On 08/19/2014 09:51 AM, Patrick Shanahan wrote:
I have postfix and by fetchmail handing to postfix I get *all* mail logged in /var/log/mail, ie: not just fetchmail's and procmail's logs.
It was a *conscious* decision :^).
From a legal POV there have been cases where a business has kept logs but not used them, inspected then, as a part of the normal day-to-day business operations, and so the courts have thrown out any evidence they might contain. My POV is 'why keep logs unless you are inspecting
My conscious decision from many decades back is to use syslog for normal situations and the more specific logging for debugging. I was influenced in this in the days of pure UNIX by the 'swatch' programme (q.v.). My conscious decision, which is comparatively recent (i.e only with 13.1) is to eliminate Postfix from the fetchmail local delivery. The thing I found with using swatch was that it made me very conscious of Marcus Ranum's observation on security. He pointed out that an umbrella was there to keep the rain off your head, and apart from that it wasn't particularly good at keeping you dry and was ineffective in high winds and/or heavy rain. But more to the point, one thing it DID NOT DO is notify you of each raindrop it successfully deflected. He came up with the term "artificial ignorance", that is, making your mind up what you want to ignore using software tools. This is akin to using "grep -v" and a good set patterns. I found that 99.99998% of the mail was unexceptional, was either processed by procmail and/or spamassassin or went into the INBOX or a folder. I do not need to log that. I'm sure there are people who DO need to log things for legal/regulator or for statistical purposes. them?'. No-one is paying me to inspect the logs on my home computer so I only bother when things aren't right. I have better things to do with my time, weeding the garden, house maintenance, cooking... YMMV. So "artificial ignorance" works well for me. -- If a better system is thine, impart it; if not, make use of mine. -- Horace -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org