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I've enabled the -v option on master.cf; but still my /var/log/maillog is almost empty. I'm having a problem i have my hard times debugging without any log.

5 Answers 5

8

is your syslogd setup to log stuff to maillog? like following:

[alexus@wcmisdlin02 ~]$ grep ^mail /etc/rsyslog.conf 
mail.*                                                  -/var/log/maillog
[alexus@wcmisdlin02 ~]$ 

also make sure it's running

[alexus@wcmisdlin02 ~]$ sudo service rsyslog status
rsyslogd (pid  1356) is running...
[alexus@wcmisdlin02 ~]$ 
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  • 1
    In my CentOs mail log is in /usr/local/psa/var/log/maillog Jan 27, 2015 at 9:25
  • ^ Florencio is right. It was there for me, too. Jun 1, 2015 at 19:42
  • Where does this dash/hyphen come from? Is that there by default? I found this the other day and was convinced that I had been hacked and the hacker put the dash there to turn off my Postfix maillog. Why is the dash there? Feb 5, 2021 at 20:33
7

I had the same log problem on CentOS-7 with postfix but also with any logger command like: 'logger System testing my log'

Checking deeper, I found out that Rsyslogd was not listening anymore on /dev/log socket !!!! This can be checked with 'lsof /dev/log'

I fixed the problem, by forcing /dev/log in /etc/rsyslogd.conf.
-- after $ModLoad imuxsock -- add this next line input(type="imuxsock" HostName="localhost" Socket="/dev/log")

This will force usage of /dev/log, which after my last update was no more the default. This is probably a bug. I have the problem with rsyslog-7.4.7-7.el7_0.x86_64 or

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  • worked for rsyslog-8.24.0-41.amzn2.2.1.x86_64
    – TPS
    Sep 10, 2020 at 6:48
2

The problem is that the default Centos 8 install no longer includes rsyslog. The configuration file (/etc/rsyslog.conf) is there, but not the program.

dnf install rsyslog
systemctl start rsyslog
systemctl enable rsyslog

worked for me.

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  • CentOS 7 and 8 log to the systemd journal; rsyslog now copies those logs from the journal to the traditional locations in /var/log. It is possible to do many other useful things by working directly with the journal, so it's worth looking at that first if you have any interesting needs (e.g. a centralized log server, more complex searching, etc). Dec 7, 2020 at 15:57
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You can solve this issue with delete maillog file and restart rsyslog service:

cd /var/log/
rm -f maillog
service rsyslog restart 
service postfix restart

source: http://forum.centos-webpanel.com/postfix/varlogmaillog-no-data-update-when-mail-incoming-and-outgoing/

0

I was having a similiar issue after moving from centos 7 to a new RHEL 8 install. Rsyslog was writing to maillog intermittently. Watching journalctl (journalctl -u postfix -f) showed that most outgoing emails were not being logged. This meant I was missing records when a customer complained about not receiving a receipt. I tried removing the - before /var/log/maillog in rsyslog.conf but this did not solve the issue.

Since I really need an easy way to locate issues with outgoing email deliveries, I just went ahead and set postfix mail log directly

postfix stop
postconf maillog_file=/var/log/maillog
postfix start

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