The mailbox.log file logs every action taken on the mailbox server, including authentication sessions, LMTP, POP3, and IMAP servers, and Index server. Review the mailbox.log to find information about the health of your server and to help identify problems.
Mailbox.log records valid and invalid login attempts, account activity such as opening email, deleting items, creating items, indexing of new mail, server activities including start and stop. The progress of an activity on the mail server is logged as INFO and if the expected results of the activity fails and errors occurs, an exception is written to the log.
The example below is a record showing that on June 25, 2007, the zimbra server with an IP address of 127.0.0.1 was in the process of deleting backups that were created on Monday, June 18, 2007 at 8 seconds after midnight Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) or older than that date.
If an error occurs during the progress of an activity, a handler exception is added to the end of the basic log record to notify you that an event occurred during the execution of the process that disrupted the normal flow. This signals that some type of error was detected.
Sometimes a stack trace is displayed after the exceptions notification. A stack logs the process in detail. A stack trace is a report of the threads and monitors in the zimbra’s
mailboxd service. This information aids in debugging, as the trace shows where the error occurred. The last few entries in the stack often indicate the origin of the problem. When the
caused by descriptor is included in the log line, this is the root of the error. In the example below, the error was caused by 501, bad address syntax.
The mailbox.log files rotate daily. The mailbox log files are saved in /opt/zimbra/log. Previous mailbox.log file names include the date the file was made. The log without a date is the current log file. You can backup and remove these files.
To review the mailbox.log for errors, search for the email address or the service that is experiencing the problem. Also, search for WARN or ERROR log levels, read the text of the message. When you find the error review the records, tracing the events that happened before the problem was recorded.
When your system crashes, look for the startup message and after finding that message, look for errors before the startup message date. This example shows an out-of-memory error on June 17, 2007.
When you are looking for an error in mail delivery, start by looking for the “LmtpServer” service. This example includes a stack trace report with a
caused by explanation that the recipient address was rejected as the address must be a fully-qualified address.
Mailbox.log logs any successful or unsuccessful login attempts from IMAP, POP3 or ZWC. When you are looking for a login error, start by looking for “Auth.” This example shows that someone from IP address 10.10.131.10 was trying to log in as admin on the Zimbra Web Client, using Firefox 2.0 in a Windows OS. Permission was denied because it was not an admin account.
When you are looking for a log because of an IMAP or POP issue, look for “ImapServer/Pop3Server.” This example shows a fatal IMAP server error occurred while trying to connect siress@example.com.
