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Trace delivery for an email address in the mail log

harmless rootMaildebian, ubuntu
Adjust the values, the command updates live
root@server
grep -i "info@example.com" /var/log/maillog | tail -n 50

Shows the last 50 log lines containing the address. What matters is the value after status=: sent means delivered, deferred means postponed, bounced means permanently rejected, each with the remote server’s reason. The queue ID lets you collect all lines belonging to one message.

Note: Plesk writes the mail log to /var/log/maillog, plain Debian with rsyslog to /var/log/mail.log.

Also searched as

  • email not arriving
  • was my email delivered
  • customer not receiving emails

Related one-liners

All in Mail

Find permanently rejected emails in the mail log

#grep "status=bounced" /var/log/maillog | tail -n 20
harmlessMail

Find a hacked mail account by its SMTP logins

#grep -o "sasl_username=[^ ,]*" /var/log/maillog | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -20
harmlessMail

Trace local PHP mail sending to a system user

#grep "postfix/pickup" /var/log/maillog | grep -o "uid=[0-9]*" | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -10
harmlessMail

Check whether Apache hit MaxRequestWorkers

#grep -i "MaxRequestWorkers" /var/log/apache2/error.log* | tail -20
harmlessApache

Find the cause of a 502 Bad Gateway in the nginx log

#grep -E "upstream|connect\(\) failed" /var/log/nginx/error.log | tail -20
harmlessnginx

Delete a single message from the Postfix queue

#postsuper -d 4F2A31C0E12
destructiveMail

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