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I am currently using IIS 6 SMTP to send out some of our mail and I unfortunately amn't finding the logging performed by it to be verbose enough - nor am I able to customise it to the level I would find verbose enough.

I'm wondering if anyone can recommend a piece of third-party SMTP software which would allow for customisability of the logging down to the point where I can inject in my own columns or perform regular expressions on the outgoing message data or headers.

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  • It sounds like you're talking about two different things: 1. Customizing the SMTP logs and 2. Modifying the outgoing email. Which is it?
    – joeqwerty
    Apr 2, 2012 at 10:43
  • Hi, I'm not actually looking to modify the outgoing email but rather take data that represents it (ie: a UUID that can be parsed out of a header in it) and then pass that into the log. So it's actually just the first part I'm looking to do and the only way I could think of to pull that data was from the outgoing mail. My main problem is that I can't find a way to pass any extra parameters (however they may be derived) into the SMTP log. Apr 2, 2012 at 10:50

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How's your Ruby?

I only ask, because I'd probably solve this problem by using Logstash, and writing a custom input plugin to accept SMTP data. Or use some kind of external filter to make SMTP data be adequately represented in one of the existing accepted input formats.

Edit: By external filter, I'm hinting at something written in a suitable scripting language (Perl, Python, etc) that will act as a SMTP client (or server, depending on your POV), connect to the SMTP server, grab the message, and then make it into a format that Logstash accepts natively, be it AMQP (my preference for this), or raw TCP.

Edit 2: I've just found a project for converting SMTP to AMQP using a rabbitMQ plugin. A bit of a long way around, potentially, but still quite a neat idea. You'd set up a RabbitMQ server with this plugin, that would then convert SMTP messages to AMQP, which Logstash would then consume and analyse.

It's a bit of a niche problem, which is why you'd probably do better writing your own, or writing a plugin for an existing something.

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  • My Ruby's not too bad but my only problem then would be that we have no other need to have Java installed on these machines :) I do accept that this is quite a niche problem but it's one unfortunately that affects a feedback loop that we're integrating! I'm not entirely sure what you mean when you say external filters here. Could you elaborate a little? Apr 2, 2012 at 10:55
  • @LorcanO'Neill Edited. Apr 2, 2012 at 11:20

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