PMDF System Manager's Guide

PMDF provides facilities for logging each message as it is enqueued and dequeued. All log entries are made to the file mail.log_current in the PMDF log directory, (i.e., PMDF_LOG:mail.log_current on OpenVMS or /pmdf/log/mail.log_current on UNIX. Logging is controlled on a per-channel basis. The logging keyword activates logging for a particular channel while the nologging keyword disables it. Logging is disabled on all channels by default.

The message return job, which runs every night around midnight, appends any existing mail.log_yesterday to the cumulative log file, mail.log, renames the current mail.log_current file to mail.log_yesterday, and then begins a new mail.log_current file.

The log file is written as normal ASCII text and the format is quite simple; see Section 31.1.2 for details.

If you want to have all of your channels log message activity to the logging file, then simply add a defaults channel block to the start of the channel block section of your PMDF configuration file. For instance,

defaults logging l defragment charset7 us-ascii charset8 dec-mcs example.com

The defaults channel would appear immediately after the first blank line in the PMDF configuration file. It is important that a blank line appear before and after the line "defaults logging". See Section 2.3.5 for a full description of the defaults channel.

Additional discussion of logging and examples of interpreting log file entries may be found in Section 31.1. That section also discusses managing the log files; in particular, note that PMDF itself never does anything to the cumulative mail.log file and it is up to each site to manage (e.g., delete, truncate, backup, etc.) that log file however they choose.