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A user would like to be able to view a web page showing any emails that a Postfix server has either been unable to send, or unable to receive.

For example if the user was supposed to receive an email from a third party but it hasn't arrived, they'd be able to check the web page and see a list of emails rejected by Postfix, along with a clear reason as to why.

I've been unable to find an existing application that offers this functionality. Does anyone know of any, or is the best way forward to write a script that parses the log and display the results?

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The perception of "clarity" of the failure message is going to be different for non-tech personnel. A typical message like

450 4.1.8 <qayecame@tataidc.co.in>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found; from=<qayecame@tataidc.co.in>

is rather going to confuse any non-tech-savvy user than give her the comfort that everything is running as it should.

It would be easy technically - running something like egrep "postfix.*reject" /var/log/mail.info and posting the output to a web page (e.g. through a CGI script) is a no-brainer. As a more sophisticated alternative, you could use AWStats to process your mail logs and create aggregate reports which would expand upon request.

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Yes, apologies for not making it clearer, I'm looking for something that can take a log file and produce something a bit more user-friendly. It's looking like the best solution at this point is to implement something bespoke to parse the log and then provide an interpretation of the error message given. – Ross Bearman Nov 24 '11 at 14:12
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There already is a solution for that. It is not free and the company has only a German Website and a German Web GUI. But it is amazing as it continuously parses the log files, assembles them (as one mail produces multiple [related] log entries), put them into a database and provides a web based GUI. It is also possible to map meaningless reject messages to extended valuable messages.

The product is called Mailtrace. With a little begging (and paying) they will provide a version in your language.

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