Postfix Contribs

Postfix is a new, highly-efficient and highly-secure Mail Transport Agent written by Wietse Venema. It was previously known as VMailer. Visit the Postfix home page to find out more. Latter development having been supported by IBM, it can also be found at IBM's alphaWorks Secure Mailer page.

This page presents my humble contributions to Postfix.

Warning: download these, don't copy-and-paste! Copy-and-paste can result in lines being unintentionally wrapped and hard-tabs being converted to spaces. Not a Good Thing.

Note to Lynx users: I've received a couple of reports by people downloading pflogsumm with Lynx that the download has long lines wrapped (see "Warning" above.) Naturally, this breaks pflogsumm.

Copyright, License, and Disclaimer

All of the programs, applications, and utilities (hereinafter referred
to as "programs") on this page are Copyright (C) 1998-2004 James S. Seymour.

These programs are free software; you can redistribute them and/or
modify them under the terms of the GNU General Public License
as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

These programs are distributed in the hope that they will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You may receive a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with these programs; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307,
USA.

An on-line copy of the GNU General Public License can be found
here.

Postfix Log Entry Summarizer

• Total number of:
  • Messages received, delivered, forwarded, deferred, bounced and rejected
  • Bytes in messages received and delivered
  • Sending and Recipient Hosts/Domains
  • Senders and Recipients
  • Optional SMTPD totals for number of connections, number of hosts/domains connecting, average connect time and total connect time
• Per-Day Traffic Summary (for multi-day logs)
• Per-Hour Traffic (daily average for multi-day logs)
• Optional Per-Hour and Per-Day SMTPD connection summaries
• Sorted in descending order:
  • Recipient Hosts/Domains by message count, including:
    • Number of messages sent to recipient host/domain
    • Number of bytes in messages
    • Number of defers
    • Average delivery delay
    • Maximum delivery delay
  • Sending Hosts/Domains by message and byte count
  • Optional Hosts/Domains SMTPD connection summary
  • Senders by message count
  • Recipients by message count
  • Senders by message size
  • Recipients by message size
  with an option to limit these reports to the top nn.
• A Semi-Detailed Summary of:
  • Messages deferred
  • Messages bounced
  • Messages rejected
• Summaries of warnings, fatal errors, and panics
• Summary of master daemon messages
• Optional detail of messages received, sorted by domain, then sender-in-domain, with a list of recipients-per-message.
• Optional output of "mailq" run

Pflogsumm.pl requires the Date::Calc module, which can be obtained here.

Production versions have been tested more thoroughly, at more sites. Beta versions are the result of enhancement requests and bug reports. While also believed to produce correct results (maybe even more accurate or better results--depending on the reason for the change), they're labeled beta until I get enough feedback to let me know all's well. (Or I fail to get any negative feed-back in the form of bug-reports.)>

Source & Docs: Production Version

Production versions have been tested more thoroughly, at more sites.

• pflogsumm-1.1.3.tar.gz [http download] [ftp download]
• pflogsumm-1.1.3.tar.gz.asc [http download] [ftp download] (PGP signature)
• pflogsumm-1.1.3.tar.gz.md5 [http download] [ftp download] (MD5 signature)
• ChangeLog [http download] [ftp download]
• FAQ [http download] [ftp download]

Source & Docs: Beta-Test Version

Beta versions are the result of enhancement requests and bug reports. While also believed to produce correct results (maybe even more accurate or better results--depending on the reason for the change), they're labeled beta until I get enough feedback to let me know all's well. (Or I fail to get any negative feed-back in the form of bug-reports.)

Beta versions are thoroughly regression-tested. Deviations, if any, are noted in the ChangeLog--as are the the reasons for them.

• pflogsumm-1.1.5.tar.gz [http download] [ftp download]
• pflogsumm-1.1.5.tar.gz.md5 [http download] [ftp download] (MD5 signature)
• ChangeLog [http download] [ftp download]
• FAQ [http download] [ftp download] (same as production version)

Source for Version 19990121-01

This was the last version of pflogsumm that supported versions of VMailer older than version 19981023. It will be kept permanently available for that reason. This version does not require the Date::Calc module. This version is not compatible with Postfix versions 20021026 or beyond.

• pflogsumm-19990121-01.pl [http download] [ftp download]
• pflogsumm-19990121-01.pl.asc [http download] [ftp download] (PGP signature)
• pflogsumm-19990121-01.pl.md5 [http download] [ftp download] (MD5 signature)

Non-English Versions of Pflogsumm

I'm looking into adding internationalization to pflogsumm. In the mean-time, here are pointers to non-English translations done by others (note: these might not necessarily be translations of the "latest & greatest"):

Note to translators: I recommend you contact me before beginning a new translation. It may be that I'm preparing to release a new version of pflogsumm.

Deutsch (German): Pflogsumm - deutsche Version (1.1.0) (web page) - by Patrick Ben Koetter

Русский (Russkij/Russian) onix.opennet.ru/files/ - by Andrew Beshkov

Pflogsumm Through A Browser

Chris Cappuccio has written a CGI script that interfaces to pflogsumm. He described it to the postfix-users mailing list as follows:

I wrote a tiny CGI to make pflogsumm easier to read.. (I like being able to scroll through its output with a mouse..) It makes it real easy.....yea... It is real easy to get running on OpenBSD or Solaris and probably most any system that postfix runs on.. It gives you a nice menu of options to select 'today', 'yesterday', or any of your last four rotations of your maillog..Especially if you use postfix in a commercial environment, other folks who don't normally use your unix machines may still find pflogsumm's output interesting.

You can find Chris' contribution here.

Other Postfix Log Analysis Tools

Craig Sanders has written a set of scripts to generate mailstats style reports and mrtg style graphs. He announced it to the postfix-users mailing list on 15 Oct., 1999, as follows (in part):

I have missed MRTG graphs of my mail since I switched from sendmail to postfix, so I wrote a set of perl scripts which do the job.

These can be found at: http://taz.net.au/postfix/mrtg/

If you know of any others, please let me know and I'll post references to them here.

Postix Anti-UCE Configuration "Cheat Sheet"

I've had a number of folks ask me for help with Postfix anti-UCE configuration, and created a "cheat sheet". Last time the subject came up, I mused that maybe I ought to officially publish the thing. Somebody replied "Yeah. That's a nice cheatsheet." Somebody else said "Thanks Jim. I see some stuff in there I wasn't using." So here it is:

Jim Seymour's suggestions/examples for Postfix anti-UCE configuration

Postix Anti-Virus/-Worm/-Trojan Header & Body Checks

Here are the header and body checks rules I use, both at my home and my work MTAs, to block potentially malicious attachment types. There's also a body check to prevent Pflogsumm's reports from being rejected (Pflogsumm FAQ item #13).

Note that these require "pcre:" map type support. To see if your Postfix installation supports that map type, do "postconf -m" and look for "pcre" in the output.

Jim Seymour's anti-virus/-worm/-trojan header_checks for Postfix
Jim Seymour's anti-virus/-worm/-trojan body_checks for Postfix

Postfix Mail Relay Swapper

chng-mail_relay.sh is used to automatically swap Postfix's default mail relay between pre-determined UUCP and SMTP hosts. Really only useful for those running a workstation at home and who normally send and receive their email via a UUCP feed, but would like to take advantage of "direct, fast delivery" when they have their PPP connection up. Postfix's configuration is so darn simple, it really lends itself well to this kind of thing :-).

Source & Docs

• chng-mail_relay.sh
• chng-mail_relay.sh.asc (PGP signature)
• just the docs

Related Pages at JIMSUN

My Unix Utilities page has some more stuff you might be able to use.

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Comments or Questions?

Created: 19 Jan, 1999 / Last updated: 5 Feb, 2012