OSX Server - Logging POP Mail Connections

Question

I am trying to keep a running record of the users that are accessing our OSX 10.6.8 Mail Server using POP instead of IMAP.

The Server Admin application features a running list of Mail connections under the "Connections" tab. This includes the user name, originating IP address, connection length, type (IMAP / POP) and overall connection count. However, the application doesn't seem to support logging these connections, and the mail.log only shows message transactions, not client logins (and there is no explicit option in the settings to track this data).

Is anyone familiar with a straightforward way to keep track of POP connections server-side? I'd like to build a list of those users so they can be migrated to IMAP, but so far short of visually monitoring the "Connections" window, there doesn't seem to be an obvious way to do so.

Answer 1

In OSX the pop3 information is currently logged at /Library/Logs/Mail/mail-info.log.

It sounds like you are using Server.app, so you may be able to manually monitor that log in the Logs tab on the top left, under the Mail category (which you select in the drop-down list under the log window). I realize that you are on a much older version of OSX, so this much more universal solution below should get you the information that you need:

1. Open up Terminal.app

2. serveradmin fullstatus mail | grep -i pop

   should output at least: mail:protocolsArray:_array_index:1:protocol = "POP3" mail:logPaths:POP Log = "/Library/Logs/Mail/mail-info.log"

3. So you'll notice that same path to mail-info.log that I've mentioned above.

4. I like to keep things simple, so finally, to solve your exact needs I would personally do something like: cat /Library/Logs/Mail/mail-info.log | grep -i Login >> ~/GetovertoIMAPpeople.txt to do your check periodically.

5. You can open the file GetovertoIMAPpeople.txt, which is now in your Home folder, and it will append the information every time you run that command.

At this page on topic desk forums it explains how to increase the log-level verbosity on those logs, and digs in a bit more to the topic in general.

If you like scripting, I saw a really neat blog post by James Reynolds where he explains how to get that directly into a spreadsheet, and provides some other useful tips.