PMDF's optional logging of message traffic is enabled via the
logging channel keyword, as described in Section 2.3.4.84 .
Enabling logging causes PMDF to write an entry to a
mail.log* file each time a message passes through a PMDF
channel. Such log entries can be useful if you wish to get statistics
on how many messages are passing through PMDF (or through particular
channels), or when investigating other questions such as whether and
when a message was sent or delivered.
If you are only interested in gathering statistics on the number of
messages passing through a few particular PMDF channels, then you may
wish to enable the logging channel keyword on just those
PMDF channels of main interest. But more generally, many sites prefer
to enable logging on all PMDF channels; in particular, if you are
trying to track down problems, the first step in diagnosing some
problems is to notice that messages are not going to the channel you
expected or intended, and having logging enabled for all channels can
help you spot such issues. See Section 2.3.4.84 for details on enabling
logging.
In addition to the basic information always provided when
logging is enabled, additional, optional information
fields may also be logged in the mail.log files,
controlled via various LOG_* PMDF options; see Section 7.3.6 .
Particularly likely to be of interest are the LOG_MESSAGE_ID,
LOG_FILENAME, LOG_CONNECTION, and LOG_PROCESS options. Enabling
LOG_MESSAGE_ID allows correlation of which entries relate to which
message. Enabling LOG_FILENAME makes it easier to immediately spot how
many times delivery of a particular message file has been retried, and
can be useful in understanding when PMDF does or does not split a
message to multiple recipients into separate message file copies on
disk. Enabling LOG_CONNECTION causes PMDF to log TCP/IP connections, as
well as message traffic, to the mail.log files by default;
alternatively, the SEPARATE_CONNECTION_LOG option may be used to
specify that connection log entries instead be written to
connection.log files. When using LOG_CONNECTION to cause
generation of TCP/IP connection entries, additionally enabling
LOG_PROCESS allows correlation of which connection entries correspond
to which message entries.
The exact information of interest in the mail.log files
tends to vary substantially from site to site. Pointers to site written
freeware utilities for analyzing the PMDF log files, which you may find
a useful starting point, can be found at the Innosoft web site:
http://www.innosoft.com