The mailstats utility prints out the statistics collected by the sendmail(1M) program on mailer usage. These statistics are collected if the file indicated by the StatusFile configuration option of sendmail (defined in /etc/mail/sendmail.cf) exists. The default statistics file is /etc/mail/statistics.

To enable mailstats, you must, as root, touch /etc/mail/sendmail.st. See the StatusFile processing option in sendmail(1M).

mailstats first prints the time that the statistics file was created and the last time it was modified. Then, the statistics for each mailer are displayed on a single line, each with the following whitespace-separated fields:

M

The mailer number.

msgsfr

Number of messages from the mailer.

bytes_from

Kbytes from the mailer.

msgsto

Number of messages to the mailer.

bytes_to

Kbytes to the mailer.

msgsrej

Number of messages rejected by the mailer.

msgsdis

Number of messages discarded by the mailer.

Mailer

The name of the mailer.

After this display, a line totaling the values for all of the mailers is displayed, separated from the previous information by a line containing only equal sign (=) characters.

To reinitialize the statistics file once a night, add an entry to root's crontab(1):

mailstats -p > /dev/null

The following options are supported:

-c configfile

-C configfile

Specifies a sendmail configuration file.

-f statisticsfile

Specifies a sendmail statistics file.

-o

Does not display the name of the mailer in the output.

-p

Outputs information in program-readable mode and clear statistics.

-P

Outputs information in program-readable mode without clearing statistics.

See largefile(5) for the description of the behavior of mailstats when encountering files greater than or equal to 2 Gbyte ( 2³¹ bytes).

/dev/null

zero-lined file

/etc/mail/statistics

default sendmail statistics file

/etc/mail/sendmail.cf

default sendmail configuration file

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

crontab(1), cron(1M), sendmail(1M), attributes(5), largefile(5)