hi. i am using qmail server. There is always some demands from the higher authorities to give them the logs of the particular person on a particular date. now all the maillogs are there in a specific folder. Now i want to know how to change the time up to which our server keeps the mail records, i mean if it is keeping the record of last 6 months, can we change to 1 year or 3 months or according to our own choice. Secondly how to extract human readable information from those logs.

You need to find out if multilog (daemontools) or logrotate is used for rotating logs: multilog responds to ALRM sig to rotate logs on demand (say a cronjob at 00:00:00) and for logrotate configuration see /etc/logrotate.d/[servicename].


That totally depends. If for instance syslog is used then it should be human readable already. If multilog is used then only time stamps are in TAI64N format on which you can run 'tai64nlocal'. It would be a different case if "higher authorities" means records are going to be subpoenaed but we're not talking about that here, right?