Search and view mail logs to determine if a message has been successfully delivered.

If this were a message posted to a mailing list, the entry for the transfer of the email from the originator to the mailing list's mailbox would look something like this:

The first line displays the date and time that the email originated, the originator's email address, the size of the message in bytes and a qmail ID. The time is determined by the originating host's time clock, on a twenty-four hour clock (i.e., ANSI or military time), normalized to Universal Time.

The second line displays the date and time that the receiving host began processing the transfer, the receiving host's email address and a message indicating whether the transfer was completed successfully, was deferred (i.e., unable to be completed at this time, in which case the system will try to complete the transfer again later) or a failure. In this example, this line contains the name of the 'ezmlm-send' process and another qmail ID, which means the message has not completed it's journey to its final destination and is being forwarded via ezmlm-send. Since this is a mailing list, this entry shows the leg of the journey from the originator to the mailing list mailbox. As you may have guessed, the second qmail ID represents the next leg of the journey, the transfer from the mailing list to the individual subscribers, as shown in the next sample entry.

The last line displays the date and time that the transfer was completed, the word 'end' to indicate the end of the transfer process, and a set of numbers in parentheses, each of which represents a count of the number of messages that fall into a certain completion status. The first number in the series represents the number of successfully completed transfers, the second is the number of transfers deferred, and the third is the number of failures. In this case, one transfer was completed successfully, and there were no deferrals or failures.

This entry displays information about the transfer of a message that has been posted to a mailing list from the list mailbox to the subscribers mailboxes. This is a small, private list with only seven subscribers.

As in the previous entry, the first line displays the date and time that the email originated, the originator's email address (which in this case is the list name), the size of the message in bytes and a qmail ID. The difference is that this time the status information says that the message was 'resent', indicating it was forwarded by the mailing list. The status information also indicates the message is 'from qp 6636', which is, of course, the ID assigned to this stage of the transfer process during the previous stage of the process. You can use the qmail IDs to follow email through multiple discrete transfer processes until it reaches its final destination.

Each of the next eight lines represents an attempt to transfer the email from the list to a subscriber. The reason there are eight lines instead of seven is that one of the transfer attempts was temporarily deferred, although it was subsequently successful. Each line displays the date and time that the receiving host began processing the transfer, the receiver's email address and a message indicating whether the transfer was completed successfully, was deferred (i.e., unable to be completed at this time so the system will retry the transfer later) or a failure. This information would include the IP addresses of each resolvable email address, represented here by a series of X's.

As before, the last line displays the date and time that the transfer was completed, the word 'end' to indicate the end of the transfer process, and a set of numbers representing the total count of successful transfers, deferred transfers and failed transfers. The string of values in parentheses '(7+1+0)' indicates seven transfers were completed successfully, there was one deferral and no failures. If this final line is missing from a log entry, a deferred transfer was still pending at the time the log was generated.