Mail server monitoring tools - Recommendations?

[Peter Bonivart]

Justin wrote:
> I would like to install a mail server monitoring tool such as MailWatch or
> Vispan. While I'm sure everyone's favorite will differ from person to
> person, I'd like to hear your recommendations. Are there certain features
> present in one tool that's not in others? Any insight as to the relative
> advantages and disadvantages of the different tools available?
>
> I'm only aware of MailWatch and Vispan at the moment (please feel free to
> enlighten me if there are others). Of the two I'm leaning towards MailWatch,
> since it seems Vispan only works with Sendmail and not the Exim MTA I'm
> using. The only issue I can see with MailWatch is that I'll have to
> downgrade my DBD-MySQL Perl module from 2.9003 to version 2.1028.

MailWatch has quite some management features so if you think you need
them, go with it. Look at the web site for more info. Vispan is pure
stats but it has a cool feature that updates the Sendmail access file
with frequent spammers. There's planned support for both Postfix and
Exim and there's already a hack for Exim. Go to the forum to find out more.

I use the older version of Vispan called MailStats and love it. I'm
testing the new Vispan 1.3 right now. I chose it over MailWatch since
it's much less to install and run (no Apache, no MySQL and so on).

http://www.while.homeunix.net/mailstats/
http://mailwatch.sourceforge.net/

Also, look at this actual site running Vispan, if that's not what you
want, maybe you should go with MailWatch.

http://hosting.boys-brigade.org.uk/mrtg/

--
/Peter Bonivart

--Unix lovers do it in the Sun

Sun Fire V210, Solaris 9, Sendmail 8.12.10, MailScanner 4.29.7,
SpamAssassin 2.63 + DCC 1.2.39, ClamAV 0.70RC + GMP 4.1.2, MailStats 0.25