Advice and answers from the Hostrare TeamKnowledge base

Troubleshoot - by Hostrare

Update On: 23 Jul 2021Email server troubleshooting

Email / Exim server troubleshooting methods. You can use the next email server troubleshooting choices in your Cpanel. Mostly applied this command to find spam emails and bulk email senders. You can also apply regularly used Exim rules, also you can apply to opportunities in WHM – > Tweak Settings – > mail

cPanel Email Configuration

Email server troubleshooting technique

To get exim mail stats

eximstats -ne -nr /var/log/exim_mainlog >> eximstats.txt

open the eximstats.txt file and verify details.
Notice the details of lines that are used to send out spam emails :

grep "cwd=" /var/log/exim_mainlog|awk ‘{for(i=1;i teststats

Script to know the mail count by various accounts

grep "cwd=" /var/log/exim_mainlog|awk ‘{for(i=1;i<=10;i++){print $i}}’|sort|uniq -c|grep cwd|sort -n

List number of mails by a domain

exigrep @domain.com /var/log/exim_mainlog|grep 2009-04-17|grep Completed|wc -l

List the number of mails send by each one.

exim -bpr | grep "<" | awk {'print $4'} | cut -d "" -f 1 | sort -n | uniq -c | sort -n

Show the list from which user’s home the mail is going, so that you can easily trace it and block it if needed.

ps -C exim -fH ewww |grep home

Show the top 50 domains using mail server with options.

eximstats -ne -nr /var/log/exim_mainlog

Show the list of main domains receiving and sending mails on the server.

exim -bp | exiqsumm

Give the IPs which are related to the server through port number 25. If one particular Ip is doing more than 10 connections you can block it in the server firewall.

netstat -plan|grep :25|awk {'print $5'}|cut -d: -f 1|sort|uniq -c|sort -nk 1

List the  “nobody” ownership spamming emails

ps -C exim -fH ewww|awk '{for(i=1;i<=40;i++){print $i}}'|sort|uniq -c|grep PWD|sort -n

The high command will give the spamming is currently in process. If the spamming has occurred some hours earlier, use the next command.

grep “cwd=” /var/log/exim_mainlog|awk ‘{for(i=1;i<=10;i++){print $i}}'|sort|uniq -c|grep cwd|sort -n

This will result in something like :
47 cwd=/root
8393 cwd=/home/sample/public_html/test

Exim server files location and logs

/etc/exim.conf – exim main configuration file

/etc/localdomains – list of domains allowed to relay mail

/etc/remotedomains – list of remote MX record domains.

/var/log/exim_mainlog – incoming/outgoing mails are logged here

/var/log/exim_rejectlog – exim rejected mails are reported here

/var/log/exim_paniclog – exim errors are logged here

/var/spool/exim/input – Mail queue

/scripts/restartsrv_exim – Cpanel script to restart exim

/etc/valiases/domainname.com – Email forwarders and catchall address file

/etc/vfilters/domainname.com – Email filters file

/home/username/etc/domainname/passwd – POP user authentication file

/home/username/mail/inbox – catchall inbox

/home/username/mail/domainname/popusername/inbox – POP user inbox

/home/username/mail/domainname/popusername/spam – POP user spambox