Rob Maidment:
> I am intending to replace Sendmail with Postfix as the MTA component in a
> secure email appliance. One of the features of the appliance is the
> ability to search for messages by subject, sender, etc, and show the
> progress of those messages through the appliance. To this end a customised
> version of Sendmail writes key events to a FIFO e.g. message accepted,
> message deferred, message delivered. (The main use-case for this is when a
> message goes missing - the admin can run the report to see whether the
> message was received, held, delivered, etc.)
>
> I would like to find a way of achieving something similar with Postfix, but
> without customising the Postfix source code (because that becomes a barrier
> to upgrading). All I can come up with is to parse the Postfix logging
> output and to generate the events when key messages appear, but this is a
> fragile solution because it's vulnerable to changes in logging output in
> future Postfix releases.
>
> Is there a better solution?
I supposed you're referring to the '-X' command-line option that
logs all traffic (to file of FIFO). This appears to be a debugging
tool that logs voluminous amounts of data including network
conversations.
Why are you not concerned about changes in Sendmail debug logging?
What I have on my wish list for Postfix is to replace the ad-hoc
logging API which is now approaching 20 years of age.
- Top layer: structured logging API, probably based on (name, value)
pairs. You can already see in the current ad-hoc implementation
that name=value is what I planned for from the beginning.
- Bottom layer: drivers for syslog, record-over-FIFO, other outputs.
Wietse
