In order to monitor some of the machines I maintain, I rely on a simple email setup using logcheck. Unfortunately that system completely breaks down if mail delivery stops.

This is the simple setup I've come up with to ensure that mail doesn't pile up on the remote machine.

Server setup

The first thing I did on the server-side is to follow Sean Whitton's advice and configure postfix so that it keeps undelivered emails for 10 days (instead of 5 days, the default):

postconf -e maximal_queue_lifetime=10d

Then I created a new user:

adduser mailq-check

with a password straight out of pwgen -s 32 .

I gave ssh permission to that user:

adduser mailq-check sshuser

and then authorized my new ssh key (see next section):

sudo -u mailq-check -i mkdir ~/.ssh/ cat - > ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

If your server also allows users to login using GDM, then you'll probably want to hide that user from the list of available users by putting the following in /var/lib/AccountsService/users/mailq-check :

[User] XSession= SystemAccount=true

Laptop setup

On my laptop, the machine from where I monitor the server's mail queue, I first created a new password-less ssh key:

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f .ssh/egilsstadir-mailq-check cat ~/.ssh/egilsstadir-mailq-check.pub

which I then installed on the server.

Then I added this cronjob in /etc/cron.d/egilsstadir-mailq-check :

0 2 * * * francois /usr/bin/ssh -i /home/francois/.ssh/egilsstadir-mailq-check mailq-check@egilsstadir mailq | grep -v "Mail queue is empty"

and that's it. I get a (locally delivered) email whenever the mail queue on the server is non-empty.

There is a race condition built into this setup since it's possible that the server will want to send an email at 2am. However, all that does is send a spurious warning email in that case and so it's a pretty small price to pay for a dirt simple setup that's unlikely to break.