I didn’t have a post yesterday because when I should have been writing that post, I was too busy racking my brain and banging my head against the proverbial wall. You see, I was making what I thought would be a relatively simple change to my server and changing one of my email addresses to something else. In retrospect, it’s really not that big of a deal and I will detail the process in my next post.

However, while working on this, things were not going as smoothly as they should have. I’m sure this is partially due to my never having done this before, but it still shouldn’t have taken me as long as it did. There was one particular part of the process that did not seem to be working right and I couldn’t for the life of me seem to figure out why it wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do.

After reading through tons of documentation on the subject, and running multiple Google searches during which I wasn’t even exactly sure what I was searching for, I was at a loss for what to do. By some random chance, one of my searches led me to a forum discussion and one of the entries made reference to the mail.log file. At this point a light bulb came on in my head. Duh! Of course, I should look in the log and see exactly what (if anything) is going on that my changes are not having any effect!

Now, I already knew about log files and have used them many times in the past to help troubleshoot and solve issues, but for some reason I never thought to check it this time around, perhaps because I’d never made use of this particular one before. So, after opening mail.log and going directly to the end of the file, I found an error message. I was happy to see this. Most people (myself included) don’t like error messages because we don’t like getting errors and they mean something is wrong. In this case, I was glad to see them because I already knew something was wrong but now I could figure out what and knew what I was looking for.

From here I was able to Google the error message, find a couple of notes on the topic, and implement a fix. Then, test, check for success and the go to the log to find the next error message and repeat. While there were a few other forces at work that slowed my success, I’m sure that I would have saved a fair amount of time had I remembered to look in the logs.

So, those files that you see from time to time that have that .log extension, they really are useful! Don’t forget about them when you’re trying to do, fix, or troubleshoot something. If it weren’t for that file, I would still be trying to figure out how to do what I wanted to do and working on getting that to work with no idea where to look or what to try next.