Introduction

Mailgraph is a software tool that generates graphs of email statistics such as spam, viruses, and more.

It provides a good overview of what’s happening on your mail server.

Mailgraph Official Site

Installation

The installation is really simple:

  apt-get install mailgraph

Now you just need to access the interface. On Apache:

  http://mysite/cgi-bin/mailgraph.cgi

And on Lighttpd:

  http://mysite/mailgraph

Mailgraph without CGI

Whether for performance, security, or simplicity reasons, it’s quite common not to have a CGI module on a server (installing CGI with nginx is tedious for example). However, the mailgraph stats tool is only designed to run in CGI. Here is a small script that allows you to generate mailgraph graphs without CGI:

  #!/bin/sh
MAILGRAPH_PATH=/usr/lib/cgi-bin/mailgraph.cgi # Debian
#MAILGRAPH_PATH=/usr/local/www/cgi-bin/mailgraph.cgi # FreeBSD
#MAILGRAPH_PATH=/usr/local/lib/mailgraph/mailgraph.cgi # OpenBSD

MAILGRAPH_DIR=/var/www/mailgraph

umask 022

mkdir -p $MAILGRAPH_DIR

$MAILGRAPH_PATH | sed '1,2d ; s/mailgraph.cgi?//' > $MAILGRAPH_DIR/index.html

for i in 0-n 0-e 1-n 1-e 2-n 2-e 3-n 3-e; do
        QUERY_STRING=$i $MAILGRAPH_PATH | sed '1,3d' > $MAILGRAPH_DIR/$i
done

This script can be added to crontab, which allows regular saving of the generated graphs. Tested on Debian, FreeBSD and OpenBSD (MAILGRAPH_PATH variable should be adapted).

FAQ

No graphs displaying under Lighttpd

I encountered this annoying bug where no graphs are displayed. To work around this issue (not in an elegant way), you must edit the file /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/50-mailgraph.conf and modify the 2nd line:

  # Alias for phpMyAdmin directory
alias.url += (
    "/mailgraph.cgi" => "/usr/lib/cgi-bin/mailgraph.cgi",
)

$HTTP["url"] =~ "^/mailgraph*", {

}

Here “/mailgraph” has been replaced with “/mailgraph.cgi”. Reload your lighttpd configuration and it should work.

Resources

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Last updated 03 Feb 2010, 06:33 +0200. history