Grep mail log for sender email and date

[mikehermary]

Hello,

I am trying to grep the mail log in Plesk using Terminal on my Mac to find the issue with an email being sent from an external email to my client's email addresses. The issue is an email message not being received by my client's email address from one sender, but they can receive messages from other senders with no problems. This issue started about two weeks ago and has remained consistent since that time. What grep command should I be using to track down the sender's email address and a date that a certain message was sent on? How does grepping an email address and sending it to a temporary file work in Plesk 10?

Here are the grep commands I am currently using:

grep 'someone@domain.com' /usr/local/psa/var/log/maillog |more

grep 'someone@domain.com' /usr/local/psa/var/log/maillog.* > tempresult.txt

Any assistance is greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Mike

 

[Faris Raouf]

There's nothing wrong with what you are doing really, but stick to one file rather than trying to use .*

If there's no sign of the address then the most likely reason for non-delivery of email is that the sender's mailserver is on a spam blacklist.

Do you have any RBLs configured in Plesk? If so and the sending mailserver's IP is listed on one of the ones that you use then the sender will be rejected before any sender email address has a chance to appear in the log (at least it does when using qmail -- no idea about postfix).

They key thing is that under normal circumstances, when a message is rejected the sender will receive a bounce message. The first question is therefore to find out what that bounce message said -- the answer to everything will be in it.

If they say "the sender didn't receive a bounce" then things get interesting. Usually people just say that without actually checking, which just makes more work for you for potentially no reason, and you are kind of stuck unless you can determine the IP of the sending mailserver.

More detailed logging is possible when using spamdyke, where you would be able to see the sending and receiving addresses in the log even when the sundering IP is on a blacklist. Unfortunately installing and configuring spamdyke is not something you want to do just to see more detail in the logs, and it requires that you use qmail rather than postfix.