SMTP Log

Searching the raw SMTP logs could sometimes reveal more info than searching OpenProtect’s filter result.

• For eg, some mails don’t reach the filter stage and instead the remote SMTP server disconnects before sending the mail data. If some one got your email address and is making contact for the first time, and made a typo and sent the mail to a wrong address, say jonh@domain.com instead of john@domain.com.
• Now searching the OpenProtect filter results for such a mail will turn up no results, since OpenProtect would’ve returned an error about the email address being invalid and the remote MTA could’ve dropped the connection. So, the mail never made to the filtering stage at all and so any search for this mail in the filter results wouldn’t show this mail t all.
• However, searching the raw SMTP log for the sender email address or his domain or server IP would turn up the full details about this event.

You can search the SMTP log for mails using the following criteria:

• You can search using an email address matched against the sender address, or the recipient address or in both of them.
• For eg, searching for john@domain.com against Address(All) will search for all mails with the address john@domain.com in either the sender or recipient fields.
• You can also search using the subject of the mail.
• You can search using a host domain name or IP address matched against a mail’s sender host or recipient host or both.
• You can also search for mails based on the Message-ID header of the mail.
• You can also search for mails based on the MTA assigned message id or Message-ID(Server) of the mail.
• You can also search for mails based on the mail’s connection id. If more than one mail were sent in the same SMTP connection, then all those mails can be seen by searching for their common connection id.
• You can add an extra filter based on mail events like connection rejects, arrivals, queued, delivered, permanent errors, temporary errors.
• You can also add another filter based on a time range to further filter the result.
• In the search result, you can click on the host name, IP, MTA message id, sender email address, subject, recipient email address etc to search for mails matching this field.