logging

[Jim Levie]

On Thu, 2002-09-12 at 16:49, Julian Field wrote:
> At 18:48 12/09/2002, you wrote:
> >I understand that #5 would result in a large amount of data being
> >generated in log files however the problem that I am attempting to solve
> >is that the mailarchive function uses a *huge* amount of space when
> >enabled.  In the end I am looking to generate per user, per domain and
> >summary statistics from this type of log.  I can see where the TO field
> >may end up as a fairly long string.  I understand if it seems impractical.
>
> Would your problem be solved by being able to archive different users' and
> different domains' mail in separate directories, where you could then just
> scan those directories themselves to produce reports on their contents?
>
> Would this be more useful than very verbose logs?
>
> >5. entries that could be used to create email usage reports.  For each
> >email to have To, From, Subject, Date, bytes, and names of any attachments
> >would allow for easier creation of user reports.
> >
> >Is there a limit on the length of a log entry? These would be *very* long.

If that sort of information was going to be logged, and I'm not sure if
that is something that MailScanner ought to be doing, it would seem to
me that it would make more sense to push the data into a file or a DB.
Syslog isn't very flexible in its logging format and we are talking
about a big growth in the log files. Seems to me that if it were going
into a separate log file or a DB the results would be easier to parse
and the maillog would remain more reasonable. The downside of that kind
of additional logging is that it is going to slow down MailScanner and
the code will be larger and more complex.
--
The instructions said to use Windows 98 or better, so I installed
RedHat.