Topic: logs and lost email

[ltwally]

Our SME 7.x box apparently had a "problem" last evening.  Sometime around 6:30pm, the "orders" account suddenly stopped getting email.  That account happens to have a consistent stream of mail coming to it -- so it indicates that either the entire server stopped receiving or that account did.

My question is this:  Given the above knowledge, where would I go to check for "lost" emails for that account?  Also, what log file should I be looking in to indicate what happened?

[imcintyre]

It sounds from your post that you don't know if you had a server problem or not so you should find out if it was down. If you "putty" in as admin, you can select item #1 and this will tell you how long the server was up for. Or if you have contrib SME7admin you could see from one of the graphs.

You don't mention if the account only stopped for a period of time or if all accounts went down or are still down. You may want to check if you have internet access, which is item 3 when you putty in as admin.

Did you ask you ip provider if they had an outage?

Hope this helps

[dmay]

My question is this:  Given the above knowledge, where would I go to check for "lost" emails for that account?  Also, what log file should I be looking in to indicate what happened?

Mail is handled by qpsmtpd which logs in /var/log/qpsmtpd.

Darrell

[CharlieBrady]

My question is this:  Given the above knowledge, where would I go to check for "lost" emails for that account?  Also, what log file should I be looking in to indicate what happened?

Mail is handled by qpsmtpd which logs in /var/log/qpsmtpd.

That's only part of the story. Incoming mail is handled by qpsmtpd. Message delivery, both local and remote, is handled by qmail, which logs in the obvious place.

[dmay]

My question is this:  Given the above knowledge, where would I go to check for "lost" emails for that account?  Also, what log file should I be looking in to indicate what happened?

Mail is handled by qpsmtpd which logs in /var/log/qpsmtpd.

That's only part of the story. Incoming mail is handled by qpsmtpd. Message delivery, both local and remote, is handled by qmail, which logs in the obvious place.

In general practice, the first place to look is in /var/log/qpsmtpd. From here you can determine whether e-mail arrived for his 'orders' account and whether or not the message made it onto qmail or was blocked by a qpsmtpd plugin. Only once you confirm the message was passed successfully to qmail-queue do you need to look deeper into qmail delivery logs and further down the delivery chain.

Darrell

[ltwally]

It sounds from your post that you don't know if you had a server problem or not so you should find out if it was down. If you "putty" in as admin, you can select item #1 and this will tell you how long the server was up for. Or if you have contrib SME7admin you could see from one of the graphs.

You don't mention if the account only stopped for a period of time or if all accounts went down or are still down. You may want to check if you have internet access, which is item 3 when you putty in as admin.

Did you ask you ip provider if they had an outage?

Hope this helps

We're off-site, and from the customer we have no idea what was going on during that period of time.  We only know that they claim that they recieved no email during that period, but that the server was running.  I know it's a vague level of information -- but it's all I have.  I'll definitely be taking a list at the logs mentioned, however.

[dmay]

See this post http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=36655.0 and use the qpsmtpd-search script.

Darrell