The sys admin’s daily grind: SendmailAnalyzer
Troop Visit
During the ongoing battle against spam, admins should inspect their troop’s battle lines from time to time. If you don’t relish the thought of counting the dinnerware, you can use the services of a logfile inspector like SendmailAnalyzer, which works surprisingly well with Postfix and the like.
I ran Sendmail 8.7 on the first mail server I operated for a large group of users, and it was hate at first sight. I kept up this War of the Roses until 8.9.0 and later moved to Postfix. In the years that followed, I lost track of the Sendmail Server Analyzer. It was not until I read a small post online that I understood that SendmailAnalyzer also can evaluate Postfix logs and messages from Amavisd-new, ClamAV, SpamAssassin, Postgrey, and other MTA appendages. High time to try out the tool.
SendmailAnalyzer comes as a sleek tar.gz package and relies on the existence of Perl and the GD libraries. After the install, you need to set up a cronjob to take care of data caching. The analyzer itself can run in the foreground or as a system service; the developers have kindly included start/ stop scripts to match. The configuration is handled in the sendmailanalyzer.conf file, although command-line parameters are also possible. The most important setting is right at the top of the configuration file.
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
Kali Linux 2025.3 Released with New Hacking Tools
If you're a Kali Linux fan, you'll be glad to know that the third release of this famous pen-testing distribution is now available with updates for key components.
-
Zorin OS 18 Beta Available for Testing
The latest release from the team behind Zorin OS is ready for public testing, and it includes plenty of improvements to make it more powerful, user-friendly, and productive.
-
Fedora Linux 43 Beta Now Available for Testing
Fedora Linux 43 Beta ships with Gnome 49 and KDE Plasma 6.4 (and other goodies).
-
USB4 Maintainer Leaves Intel
Michael Jamet, one of the primary maintainers of USB4 and Thunderbolt drivers, has left Intel, leaving a gaping hole for the Linux community to deal with.
-
Budgie 10.9.3 Now Available
The latest version of this elegant and configurable Linux desktop aligns with changes in Gnome 49.
-
KDE Linux Alpha Available for Daring Users
It's official, KDE Linux has arrived, but it's not quite ready for prime time.
-
AMD Initiates Graphics Driver Updates for Linux Kernel 6.18
This new AMD update focuses on power management, display handling, and hardware support for Radeon GPUs.
-
AerynOS Alpha Release Available
With a choice of several desktop environments, AerynOS 2025.08 is almost ready to be your next operating system.
-
AUR Repository Still Under DDoS Attack
Arch User Repository continues to be under a DDoS attack that has been going on for more than two weeks.
-
RingReaper Malware Poses Danger to Linux Systems
A new kind of malware exploits modern Linux kernels for I/O operations.