How to verify that an auto-reply was sent?

[dstoliker]

I have a user that needs to verify that an auto-reply was sent to a customer. Is there a way to do this?

[Mike Scholes]

grep your logs

[dstoliker]

I've seen it suggested to grep the zimbra.log file and look for a received email followed closely by a sent email. Is there a more reliable method?

[Mike Scholes]

Not to my knowledge, grep always seems to get what I need. Are your needs more specific? I must admit I use exim here, that deals with all mail, external and internal so maybe I get more from the exim logs than Zimbras postfix logs.

[dstoliker]

I just need to confirm whether or not an auto-reply message was sent in response to a specific customer email. It doesn't look like the postfix logs provide that level of detail, so I was hoping for something that might.

[Mike Scholes]

Looking at my logs I see what you mean, the message Id is different and there is no subject line to compare. The only way I could tell/guess would be what you have already suggested, looking at the times for inbound and outbound mail from/to the sender in question. Not sure if you can modify things so that the subject line was included in the logs, wouldn't know how to do that and it wouldn't help for old mail anyway.

[Mike Scholes]

Having said that in exim I can add a switch to include the subject to the log files, wonder if postfix can do this? In exim it's log_selector = +subject maybe you could google that along with exim and postfix to see if there is a postfix equivalent.

[dstoliker]

According to this page, it looks like one can modify the header_checks file to include

/^subject:/      WARN

and it will log the subject.

[Mike Scholes]

Perhaps a fix for when you need it again. Remember though that upgrading zimbra overwrites some config files including master.cf so you might want to backup your changes.