We've been using Exchange across our enterprise for the last year and a half. It's doing fine, integrates with the BlackBerry's and our VOIP system voicemail. No complaints.However, I desperately miss the straightforward and effective logging of the various *nix systems e.g. Sendmail, Postfix, Qmail, et al. Or in other words, tail -f /var/log/maillog.Is there a utility or any other Exchange equivalent to the very effective and efficient tail -f on the maillog at /var/log/maillog?

Many of us, including myself aren't fimiliar with sendmail and don't know what that string does. Can you explain the feature so that we can comment more fully?

Tail -f <filename>is just the standard 'output all changes to <filename> to the screen.The onlyfile you really need to know exactly what the mail server is doing is /var/log/maillog A snip from such a log below; Oct 14 14:46:53 seresource sendmail[9105]: l9ELkonj009103: to=<jmartinez@smartequip.net>, delay=00:00:01, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=esmtp, pri=122640, relay=[10.10.0.45] [10.10.0.45], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent ( <295273559.50419272570886@tru-check.com> Queued mail for delivery) Oct 14 14:48:48 seresource sendmail[9099]: l9BIkIoB027837: to=<dtheetge@ur.com>, delay=3+03:02:29, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=esmtp, pri=6948817, relay=ironport.ur.com., dsn=4.0.0, stat=Deferred: Connection timed out with ironport.ur.com. In the above it's very easy to track the first piece of mail was delivered to the destination, the second was deferred - so I know to go flush the deferred queue. For mail that wasn't delivered, you usually get the reason for that too - refused no reverse record, no such user, etc. By just using tail -f on your maillog, you know before your users if a piece of mail is delivered or not. I would love to have an equivalent for Exchange to handle the proverbial 'very important piece of email, what's wrong with our server?' (usually an executive or marketing person) scenario. Thanks for any input.

For exchange 03, you'll see the logs in the inetpub\mailrootfolder you can also turn up SMTP logging to verbose but what you see see in the smtp folder shoudl be pretty similar to what you see in sendmail.