As part of diagnosing a support issue our support team may ask you to send them various log files. This page explains how to obtain the right files at the right time.

Under its default settings VPOP3 logs a minimal amount of information about what it is doing to various files in the main VPOP3 directory. When investigating a support issue it is often the case that we will need you to switch on logging to extra files or increase the level of detail being written to the main log. This can generate a lot of data; up to several MB per second. In order to prevent disks getting filled up with logged data VPOP3 limits the maximum size of these log files. By default this size is set to 1MB but can be increased in Settings → Diagnostics. Once the files reach their maximum size they are renamed with a .lbk extension (.old in versions prior to 2.4.7) and a new .log file is started.

The log files will be found in the directory specified under Settings → Diagnostics → General → Log Path. By default, generally speaking in older versions of vPOP3 you'll find the log files in the main VPOP3 directory. In newer versions you may find the log files in the _log subdirectory within the main VPOP3 directory. The exact rules for deciding where the log files are stored depends on your upgrade history and what settings changes you have made.

The main log files of interest have the following as the first part of their filename (before the .log or .lbk extension):

When we need to see log files we'll let you know exactly which files we need.

Most of the time it's easy enough to catch the right data in the log files but on a busy server there can be so much data being written to the logs that you need to be pretty quick to grab the data from the logs before they are overwritten. Here's the general approach that works well in all cases:

1. Switch on any of the session logs (e.g. smtpclt, imap4svr etc.) you've been asked for on the Settings → Diagnostics → Sessions page.
2. Set the maximum size of these files to an appropriate value (10MB is good for a busy VPOP3 installation) on the Settings → Diagnostics → Sessions page.
3. Set Settings → Diagnostics → General → Log Level to Full Logging if you've been asked for a VPOP3 log on full logging.
4. Set the maximum size of the main VPOP3 log file to an appropriate value (10MB is good for a busy VPOP3 installation) using Settings → Diagnostics → General → Maximum log size page.
5. Perform the actions necessary to trigger the problem you're trying to solve.
6. Immediately the problem occurs copy the relevant log files to a temporary directory to avoid the data being overwritten by subsequent data.
7. Send us the log files.