Re: mail log question
On Fri, Sep 12, 2025 at 13:24:37 +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> On 2025-09-09 22:20:01 -0400, Greg Wooledge wrote:
> > Or, if you don't care about those files and just want to read the systemd
> > log files, you can use journalctl(1). Specifically, a command like
> >
> > journalctl -u postfix
> >
> > where "postfix" is the systemd service name in question, will show you
> > the logs for that service.
>
> No, this is incorrect, at least on bookworm (it gives just a few logs):
>
> Sep 08 01:50:46 joooj systemd[1]: Starting postfix.service - Postfix Mail Transport Agent...
> Sep 08 01:50:46 joooj systemd[1]: Finished postfix.service - Postfix Mail Transport Agent.
>
> Using a pattern
>
> journalctl -u postfix\*
>
> gives any log related to postfix, but this is terribly slow
> (more than 3 minutes on my server!) and limited to postfix
> (nothing about spamassassin, for instance).
Welcome to systemd logging. It's really quite horrible.
Spamassassin's log messages are written by a different service, so if
you want to see those, you would use "journalctl -u spamassassin" or
whatever its service name is.
The other thing you might need to know is that you can get different
levels of verbosity when you run the journalctl command as root vs.
non-root. When you "only" got the Starting and Finished messages,
I'm betting you ran the journalctl command as a non-root user. Try it
as root.
If you want all of the "mail-related" messages to be in a single
file, install rsyslog and use the traditional human-readable log files
under /var/log.
Reply to: