location of mail logs for mails sent from elgg?

i appreciate this might be different for every server.. i'm using centos 6.3.

essentially, i am looking for the location of the records of what mails are sent via elgg.. if i login to the webmail for the account that sends the mails i see zero.. and searching the server hard drive and databases has not yet revealed to me much in the way of clues. i've looked in /var/mail/ and so on. i am using dovecot and postfix and iredadmin/iredmail presently.

(what i am actually looking for is the messages themselves, so i can look at the content and formatting.. and also access any bounce messages that come from the recipient server - such as hotmail).

does anyone have any tips?

  • My sendmail logs by default to /var/log/maillog (Amazon AMI - Red Hat)

  • Hmm: Vazco; why you post sooo helpfully? lolz;)
    you got me curious;
    so poked around a bit..
    CentOS 5
    (qmail is mail program)
    INCOMING:

        /var/qmail/mailnames/DOMAIN.com/USERID/Maildir/new
    OUTGOING:
        /var/qmail/queue/mess/14
    Example -->
    Received: (qmail 9999 invoked by uid 999); 30 Nov 2012 22:59:52 -0500
    Date: 30 Nov 2012 22:59:52 -0500
    Message-ID: <999999999999.9999.qmail@U99999999.XXXXXXXX-XXXXXXX.com>
    To: XXXXXXXX@XXXXXXXX.com
    Subject: XXXXXXXXXXXX wants to be your friend!
    From: XXXXXXX@XXXXXXXX.com
    Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
    MIME-Version: 1.0
    Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
    XXXXXXXX wants to be your friend! But they are waiting for
    you to approve the request...so login now so you can approve the request!
    . . .

  • thanks for the paths...
    my server doesn't have qmail. i do have a mail and vmail folder in the var directory.. but no messsages in there.. not sure why. 

  • /var/mail (or /var/qmail or similar depending on the mailer daemon) is either only the spool directory or a link to the spool directory in /var/spool/mail. You will find only undelivered / unprocessed mails there.

    The location of the log is more likely in /var/log. Again the name of the log can be slightly different depending on the mailer daemon used, for example simply "mail" or maillog. There might also be different logs, for example "mail.error", "mail.warning" etc.

    I don't think the emails sent by Elgg are saved anywhere on the server. Most likely you will only find some records in the logs about these mails. Bouncing mails should turn up in the inbox of the server's admin email account (or the account defined in the mailserver settings). You might get access to these mails via the administration interface of your server (at least it works this way with CPanel in my case). Or you might need to check out the home directory of your webspace user (/home/<username>) for example for a directory named "Mail".

  • ah ok.. i can see the many logs.. just no records of full messages.. probably they aren't being stored long enough for me to observe them.

    i've sent a message to hotmail using details of a manually created mail, rather than one from elgg.. hopefully that will be enough detail for them.