I am intending to replace Sendmail with Postfix as the MTA component in a secure email appliance. One of the features of the appliance is the ability to search for messages by subject, sender, etc, and show the progress of those messages through the appliance. To this end a customised version of Sendmail writes key events to a FIFO e.g. message accepted, message deferred, message delivered. (The main use-case for this is when a message goes missing - the admin can run the report to see whether the message was received, held, delivered, etc.)
I would like to find a way of achieving something similar with Postfix, but without customising the Postfix source code (because that becomes a barrier to upgrading). All I can come up with is to parse the Postfix logging output and to generate the events when key messages appear, but this is a fragile solution because it's vulnerable to changes in logging output in future Postfix releases. Is there a better solution? regards, Rob Maidment
