12.09.25, 14:05 +0200, Greg Wooledge: > On Fri, Sep 12, 2025 at 13:24:37 +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote: >> On 2025-09-09 22:20:01 -0400, Greg Wooledge wrote: >>> Or, if you don't care about those files and just want to read the systemd >>> log files, you can use journalctl(1). Specifically, a command like >>> >>> journalctl -u postfix >>> >>> where "postfix" is the systemd service name in question, will show you >>> the logs for that service. >> >> No, this is incorrect, at least on bookworm (it gives just a few logs): >> >> Sep 08 01:50:46 joooj systemd[1]: Starting postfix.service - Postfix Mail >> Transport Agent... >> Sep 08 01:50:46 joooj systemd[1]: Finished postfix.service - Postfix Mail >> Transport Agent. >> >> Using a pattern >> >> journalctl -u postfix\* >> >> gives any log related to postfix, but this is terribly slow >> (more than 3 minutes on my server!) and limited to postfix >> (nothing about spamassassin, for instance). > > Welcome to systemd logging. It's really quite horrible. > > Spamassassin's log messages are written by a different service, so if > you want to see those, you would use "journalctl -u spamassassin" or > whatever its service name is. > > The other thing you might need to know is that you can get different > levels of verbosity when you run the journalctl command as root vs. > non-root. When you "only" got the Starting and Finished messages, > I'm betting you ran the journalctl command as a non-root user. Try it > as root. > > If you want all of the "mail-related" messages to be in a single > file, install rsyslog and use the traditional human-readable log files > under /var/log.
If you just want to see all "mail-related" messages with journalctl, you can use $ journalctl --facility mail That doesn't help with journalctl's slowness if the journal has grown big, of course. -- Regards mks
