Postfix Insights vs pflogsumm: log summaries, search, and a dashboard (2026)
pflogsumm is a mature, lightweight Perl script that aggregates Postfix maillog activity into a periodic text summary. Postfix Insights is an interactive search and dashboard over the same log data. They are fundamentally different tools designed for different jobs: pflogsumm excels at scheduled digests; Postfix Insights excels at point-in-time diagnosis and trend discovery. This guide shows where each shines and where they complement each other.
What is pflogsumm?
Section titled “What is pflogsumm?”pflogsumm, written by James S. Seymour, is a single Perl script that parses the Postfix maillog and produces a summary report. It runs as a scheduled job (typically via cron) and generates a text digest showing message volume, byte counts, top senders and recipients, deferral and bounce reason breakdowns, per-hour traffic distribution, and rejection summaries. The report is typically mailed to an administrator at a fixed interval (daily, weekly, monthly) as a lightweight notification of overall maillog activity.
pflogsumm has been a sysadmin staple for years because it is:
- Minimal: a single Perl file with only the Date::Calc module as a dependency.
- Reliable: proven behavior across decades of Postfix deployments.
- Low-overhead: runs in seconds on a cron schedule, no background daemon.
- Self-contained: no external database, no web server, no UI framework.
It is genuinely unbeatable for the job it does: a periodic text report that can be mailed, logged, or archived.
What is Postfix Insights?
Section titled “What is Postfix Insights?”Postfix Insights is a self-hosted FastAPI application that exposes two surfaces over the same Postfix maillog data:
- Interactive search by recipient, domain, or subject (with optional date range). Results are parsed and correlated by queue ID into structured per-recipient delivery records, showing raw log lines and formatted status. Results stream to the browser via Server-Sent Events.
- Delivery-health dashboard (
/stats) that aggregates volume, bounce and defer rate, SLA, domain mix, slow domains, DSN breakdown, and calendar/heatmap trends. A background scanner rolls log data into hourly, daily, and weekly tiers in a libSQL store so trends stay fast across months of mail.
Postfix Insights runs as a long-lived service (typically in Docker) against local logs or SSHFS-mounted remote logs. It exposes a web UI at a configurable port.
Core structural difference
Section titled “Core structural difference”| Capability | pflogsumm | Postfix Insights |
|---|---|---|
| Output format | Text report | Web UI (search + dashboard) |
| Execution model | Scheduled cron job | Long-lived service |
| Search by recipient / domain / subject | No | Yes |
| Queue-ID correlation | No | Yes (per-message, per-recipient status) |
| Interactive dashboard | No | Yes (volume, bounce/defer rate, SLA, trends, heatmap) |
| Time-series trends | No | Yes (hourly/daily/weekly tiers) |
| Alerting engine | No | Yes (threshold and anomaly alerts to email and webhook) |
| Remote logs (SSHFS) | No | Yes |
| TLS / DKIM coverage | No | Yes (outbound TLS coverage by negotiated version; DKIM signing rate) |
| Setup overhead | Minimal (copy script, configure cron) | Moderate (Docker, libSQL sidecar, environment variables) |
| Export | Email, text file, stdout | CSV, JSON, copy to clipboard, emailed report with CSV |
Where pflogsumm excels: if you want a scheduled digest of aggregate statistics to land in your inbox every morning, pflogsumm does exactly that with near-zero overhead and no external dependencies. It is simpler and more efficient for that specific job.
Where Postfix Insights excels: if you need to look up a specific recipient’s recent delivery status, diagnose a domain’s bounce pattern, or observe trends in your mail volume over weeks, Postfix Insights provides interactive drill-down, queue-ID tracing, and historical analysis that pflogsumm does not offer.
Use cases and recommendations
Section titled “Use cases and recommendations”Use pflogsumm when
Section titled “Use pflogsumm when”- You want a daily or weekly emailed summary of maillog aggregates (message counts, top senders, bounce reasons).
- Your team is comfortable with plaintext reports or log-file archives.
- You have no appetite for running a long-lived service or containerized application.
- You operate a single mail server and cron-based reporting is sufficient.
Use Postfix Insights when
Section titled “Use Postfix Insights when”- You need to investigate a specific message’s delivery path (find it by recipient, domain, or subject; see the per-recipient status and DSN).
- You want to discover trends: which domains are slow, where bounces are concentrated, whether SLA is holding.
- You operate multiple mail servers and want a single pane of glass (via SSHFS mounts).
- You prefer a self-hosted web UI over email reports.
- Your team uses dashboards and prefers interactive exploration to text digests.
Use both
Section titled “Use both”The two tools are not mutually exclusive. Many operators run pflogsumm for the daily emailed summary (a traditional, lightweight notification) and Postfix Insights for interactive diagnosis and the /stats dashboard. This gives you both the scheduled digest and the on-demand search.
For example:
- pflogsumm runs nightly via cron, mails a summary, and you skim it for anomalies.
- When something needs investigation (a domain has high bounce rate, a recipient reports delivery delays), you open Postfix Insights, search, and drill into per-message details.
- The
/statsdashboard shows you multi-week trends and SLA metrics that pflogsumm’s daily digest cannot.
This combination leverages the strengths of both: low-overhead scheduled reporting plus interactive diagnosis.
Getting started
Section titled “Getting started”If you have already chosen Postfix Insights and want to install it, see the Quick start guide for Docker setup in four commands.
For pflogsumm, download the script from https://jimsun.linxnet.com/postfix_contrib.html, read the man page or included documentation, and schedule it via cron. The Postfix documentation at https://www.postfix.org/documentation.html also references pflogsumm in the context of log analysis.
Both tools read the same maillog file, so there is no conflict in running both. Postfix Insights will pick up the maillog from the standard location (configurable via LOCAL_LOG_DIR and MAIL_LOG_BASENAME environment variables) and search/aggregate it; pflogsumm will do the same on its cron schedule.