mail server
Postfix: Log E-mails’ Subject
In Linux, you can view the statistics of incoming and outgoing E-mails by peeking into a log file called maillog (typically found in /var/log directory). Maillog provides the general information about the mails, for example, the sender and recipient(s), status – sent, rejected, bounced etc. I typically use maillog to check the destiny of mails. At times, it becomes difficult to spot a particular mail due to the sheer volume of mails being logged – especially on a production mail server.
For example: what if we need to check whether a particular mail sent by Person A has been delivered to Person B. Note that Person A might be sending lots of mails to Person B but we need to spot that one particular mail – say the one, which was sent by Person A but did not reach Person B. The only identifier, to identify a particular mail, in the maillog is the cryptic message ID. A better and more readable identifier would be the subject of an E-mail.Unfortunately, the subject of the mails is not logged, by default, in the maillog. But we can configure a mail server like Postfix to log the subject line. Read the rest of this entry »
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Display Microsoft Word’s Special Characters through Apache
Recently, I carried out a Linux server upgrade for a client where I did a clean install of the latest operating system/distribution. Since it was a clean install I had to backup and note down the earlier configuration (of mail server, web server, database) and redo those changes. Mostly I preferred not to simply overwrite with the backed up configuration files. I rather documented and edited the configuration manually.
It all seemed to have gone smoothly and the new server has been up and running. But one not-so-fine day, the client started complaining that some HTML pages are not displaying properly. These were showing question marks (?) and some other weird characters. I figured out that these HTML pages were generated using Microsoft Word and had those special characters (closing quotes, double hyphens etc.). I discussed with the client that this could be a web browser problem because it is not able to use the correct character set. Read the rest of this entry »
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