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
US / Canada
UK / Australia
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
-
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.
-
Happy Birthday, Linux
On August 25, Linux officially turns 34.
-
VirtualBox 7.2 Has Arrived
With early support for Linux kernel 6.17 and other new additions, VirtualBox 7.2 is a must-update for users.
-
Linux Mint 22.2 Beta Available for Testing
Some interesting new additions and improvements are coming to Linux Mint. Check out the Linux Mint 22.2 Beta to give it a test run.
-
Debian 13.0 Officially Released
After two years of development, the latest iteration of Debian is now available with plenty of under-the-hood improvements.
-
Upcoming Changes for MXLinux
MXLinux 25 has plenty in store to please all types of users.
-
A New Linux AI Assistant in Town
Newelle, a Linux AI assistant, works with different LLMs and includes document parsing and profiles.
-
Linux Kernel 6.16 Released with Minor Fixes
The latest Linux kernel doesn't really include any big-ticket features, just a lot of lines of code.