How to read mail that has been sent

[cmcleod]

I am a novice Unix user who would like to know if there is a way to view the sent items on a unix server. We have some nightly shell scripts that are supposed to send emails out and I need to know if this one was sent. The person who was supposed to recieve the email did not but I would like to check anyways. Thanks for the help.

 

[bjverzal]

If you have a syslogd running, check your syslog. Look in /etc/syslog.conf to see the name of the file, and do a "ps -ef | grep syslog" to see if it is running.

Somewhere in the syslog (if you are trapping E-mail messages), you'll see the mail been sent.

Try the "mailq" command to see if the mail is waiting to go out.

Bill.

 

[jad]

if you are postmaster you should receive error messages ...
if you type 'mailq' and the message is still there then you can read that ...
if your script backs up the mail to a secure directory before sending it then you can look at that ...

else no, if it's not there any more you can't read it

 

[trunix]

You may need to edit your /etc/syslog.conf file to ensure that mail messages are sent to the syslog file. Check the man page on syslogd to see how the config file is structured.

 

[cmcleod]

Thanks for all the suggestions. Since I am not the unix administrator I am sending this questions onto them. There was nothing in the queque and from what I can see in the syslog.conf file it looks like messages are not being recorded.