Well, on a high-traffic mail server we need to follow the server log, to look for possible issues. The “tail -f” method might just not be as good as we would want, text is going up too fast and web just can’t read that fast.

A solution to that is multitail.

On CentOS/RHEL we would find this package in the EPEL repo. We need to do a “yum install multitail”, in Debian/Ubuntu we do a “apt-get install multitail”.

After the package is installed there’s one tiny thing do do, we would edit the file /etc/multitail.conf and search for the line

scheme:postfix:/var/log/mail/

and replace the path with your real maillog, something like this:

scheme:postfix:/var/log/maillog

or, on Debian&Co:

scheme:postfix:/var/log/maill.log

Then all we need to do is:

multitail  /var/log/maillog

You’ll be amazed how easy is now to follow the logs 🙂