This document aggregates methods of creating mail server statistics. Starting with version 0.1.0 it gives information about pflogsumm.pl.
A list of software that has mail statistic features.
| Name | Cov. | URL |
|---|---|---|
| pflogsum | Yes | https://jimsun.linxnet.com/postfix_contrib.html |
| lightmeter | No | https://gitlab.com/lightmeter/controlcenter/ |
| Postscreen-Stats | No | https://github.com/jvehent/Postscreen-Stats |
| PostConf | No | https://www.postconf.com/docs/spamrep/ |
| AWStats | No | https://awstats.sourceforge.io/ |
| Mailgraph | No | https://mailgraph.schweikert.ch/ |
| MRTG w. scripts | No | http://taz.net.au/postfix/mrtg/ |
| Logrep | No | https://sourceforge.net/projects/logrep/ |
A list of software that has no mail statistic features.
| Name | Cov. | URL |
|---|---|---|
| Poststats | No | https://github.com/jpylypiw/poststats |
| Version | Date | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 0.1.5 | 2024-01-31 | Improve writing |
| 0.1.4 | 2022-11-13 | Fix typo |
| 0.1.3 | 2022-06-04 | Changed shell to bash; updated cron settings, links |
| 0.1.2 | 2022-05-09 | Change level of sections (one down) |
| 0.1.1 | 2022-05-05 | Add poststats, list of software, links, front matter |
| 0.1.0 | 2022-05-04 | Initial release with pflogsumm.pl |
When searching for “postfix mail statistic” the first 10 results are referring to a Perl script that analyses the Postfix log files. pflogsumm.pl is a script written by James S. Seymour and copyrighted 1998-2004 under the GPL v2+ license and lives on https://jimsun.linxnet.com/postfix_contrib.html as of this writing (2022-05-04).
The pflogsumm script aims to provide an overview of past mail server activities, offering administrators a ‘heads-up’ in case of troubles.
aptitude install pflogsummWhile some contributions, for example by Falko Timme, are suggesting to configure logrotate to have a dedicated log over 24 hours, I got the impression that pflogsumm can do this already by itself via a time stamp query and keywords like yesterday. I agree that when using the yesterday feature, the results depend on the time at which the cron job is executed. Additionally, re-invoking the same job after 24 hours would yield different results. So a recreation of the reports would be more difficult. However usually as a ‘heads-up’ using the yesterday scope as a one time shot cron job seems justified.
As pflogsumm has a lot of command line options it might be advisable to create a script to execute it.
For a daily (yesterday) summary to be executed after 24:00 every day (0:10):
#!/bin/bash
/usr/sbin/pflogsumm -d yesterday --iso-date-time /var/log/mail.log 2>&1 |\
/usr/bin/mailx -s "`hostname --fqdn` daily mail statistic" postmasterThen add a line to cron:
10 0 * * * /usr/local/sbin/postfix-statistics-pdflogsumm-yesterdayFor a weekly summary, for Debian 10 and 11 logrotate is configured for some locale to start the week on Sunday 00:00. So you would need to execute the script 10 before the end of the week on the current log file or 10 minutes after the week started on the last log file. We use the latter to be executed after 24:00 on every Sunday (4:10):
#!/bin/bash
/usr/sbin/pflogsumm --iso-date-time /var/log/mail.log.1 2>&1 |\
/usr/bin/mailx -s "`hostname --fqdn` weekly mail statistic" postmasterThen add a line to cron
10 4 * * 0 /usr/local/sbin/postfix-statistics-pdflogsumm-weekUnlike the name the poststats tool (GPLv3), despite the name is postfix monitor with a web interface and mail sending capability triggered via cron. As it does not provide statistics, poststats will not be covered in this document.