QMail: How do I track the activity for a certain email address

Question

I'm rather new to dealing with qmail and Linux, so please be patient with me. I have an issue with a specific email address owner complaining that incoming emails are being received slowly and sometimes, they come though only a day or so after the they have been sent. What I would like to do is to display, say, an SMTP log of the interaction between the emails coming into this problematic email address.

Where should I start looking to begin resolving this issue? I've already run "qmHandle -l" to see what's in the queue, and it notifies me that there are over 90 emails in the remote queue, and about 7 in the local queue.

In short, what I'm trying to do is just view a log of all the traffic between this problematic email address and all incoming emails to this email address.

Many Thanks!! :)

Answer 1

You didn't say what distribution you are on, so I will assume a redhat variant for this example:

grep /var/log/qmail/send/current "<local_users_email>"

For realtime viewing use the following:

tail -f /var/log/qmail/send/current | grep "<local_users_email>"

Answer 2

i'd check qmail-smtpd's logs first in /var/log/qmail/smtpd/current , also /var/log/maillog or /var/log/all.log

basically look in the logs connection from their smtp server to yours, see if your server refuses email for whatever reason: greylist for example another common issue is a DNS issues.