Red Hat Knowledgebase

You can generate a lot of useful statistics from postifx mail logs by using the pflogsumm utility. It processes mail logs quickly and generates detailed reports about mail usage on the system which can be used to gauge performance of the mail server.

To install pflogsumm you will need to install the postfix-pflogsumm package. This is available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5.

To install on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4:

up2date -i postfix-pflogsumm

To install on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5:

yum install postfix-pflogsumm

To generate a standard report run the pflogsumm on your systems mail log. Typically on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux system this will mean running:

pflogsumm /var/log/maillog

The output of the report will go to the screen but you can direct this to a file in order to save and review later:

pflogsumm /var/log/maillog > mailreport.txt

Note: The pflogsumm utility is only designed to create mail usage reports from mail logs generated by the postfix mail server. Other mail servers provided in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, such as sendmail and exim, use differently formatted logging which pflogsumm can not process.