Re: Adding timestamp to maillog

Peter Pentchev <[email protected]> Fri, 11 Sep 2020 00:53:26 +0300
Newsgroups	gmane.mail.fetchmail.user
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
On Thu, Sep 10, 2020 at 01:43:36PM -0700, James Moe via Fetchmail-users wrote:
> On 9/10/20 10:36 AM, Dennis Putnam wrote:
> 
> > Has anyone figured out how to add a timestamp on the fetchmail log
> > messages to the maillog? TIA
> >
>   Not that I ever found.
>   My configuration file has these entries as a workaround:
> 
> set logfile "/path/to/fetchmail.log"
> poll example.com interval 1
>   protocol imap username "account_name_of_interest" password "secret"
>   preconnect "echo `date +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S` <account_name_of_interest> >>
> /path/to/fetchmail.log
>   ... other stuff ...
> 
>   It does result in an entry for every time fetchmail connects to a server to
> check for mail even if no mail is available.

Huh... I guess I never thought I'd need that, since I've always run
fetchmail in daemon mode with the -v option, and (at least for a long
time, maybe always) it outputs lines like:

fetchmail: 6.4.8 querying mail.example.com (protocol IMAP) at 11.09.2020 (пт)  0:46:26: poll started
...
fetchmail: 6.4.8 querying mail.example.com (protocol IMAP) at 11.09.2020 (пт)  0:48:26: poll completed
fetchmail: sleeping at 11.09.2020 (пт)  0:48:26 for 120 seconds

(the "пт" part is the Bulgarian abbreviation for "Friday")

Other than that, I'd suggest somehow running a combination of fetchmail
and one of the logging tools like Prof. Bernstein's "multilog", but that
would require a reliable mechanism of starting both processes and making
sure both of them keep running, and there are not so many ways of doing
that if not using a service supervision framework like daemontools,
runit, s6, or similar. Of course, one could always write a simple Perl /
Python / Ruby / Rust / maybe even C program that starts two processes
and kills them both if anything bad happens, but that's not what I'd
consider an easy general solution.

G'luck,
Peter

-- 
Peter Pentchev  [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
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