msmtp cannot write to /var/log/msmtp/msmtp.log

In /etc/msmtprc I added credentials for a gmail account and also specified a log file to use in /var/log/msmtp/msmtp.log

I also created the folder and file in /var/log/msmtp/msmtp.log

When I test it using: echo "This is a test e-mail from my server using msmtp!" | msmtp ******@gmail.com

I receive an email but in the terminal I also see an error message like so: msmtp: cannot log to /var/log/msmtp/msmtp.log: cannot open: Permission denied

The current permissions for /var/log/msmtp are:

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 29 20:19 msmtp

What am I doing wrong? What do the permissions on the log file need to be for msmtp to be able to write to the file?

5 Answers

I had the same error message, and ultimately changing permissions, creating the log file, etc., didn't work. The problem in my case was caused by AppArmor: in my system, the file /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.msmtp only listed /var/log/msmtp as write permission in /var/log, so solution can be:

• to use /var/log/msmtp as log in the configuration, instead of /var/log/msmtp.log
• modify the rules in the msmtp apparmor profile to allow adding and locking the file we want.

After installing msmtp there is an msmtp user and group. If you change the ownership of the logfile to msmtp, and change rights to read/write for user and group, the logging works.

groups msmtp
sudo touch /var/log/msmtp
sudo chown msmtp:msmtp /var/log/msmtp
sudo chmod 660 /var/log/msmtp

I haven't tested it, but I suppose this works for /var/log/msmtp/msmtp.log as well, if you set the rights for the folder properly.

On a laptop running Debian stable, I also had the permission denied error. I set the log to be ~/var/msmtp.log. It was caused by apparmor as well. To correct it, I found the log lines in /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.msmtp:

 owner @{HOME}/.msmtp*.log wk, /var/log/msmtp wk,

I copied the first line above to the usr.bin.msmtp in /etc/apparmor.d/local and edited it to point to my log location:

 owner @{HOME}/var/msmtp*.log wk,

I rebooted because I didn't take the time to figure out how to get apparmor to read the updated files. Now it logs properly.

I tried with 0640 but it did not work, it workd only with 0770 (I chowned with user msmtp + 0640, but it did not work either)

# mkdir /var/log/msmtp
# chmod -R 0770 /var/log/msmtp
# [nano|vim] /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.msmtp owner /var/log/msmtp/msmtp.log wk,
# service apparmor restart
$ echo 'message test mail backup' | msmtp the.email

I prefer to have my email logs in /var/log/mail.log because that's the default in /etc/rsyslog.d/50-default.conf and I wanted to avoid modifying apparmor config if possible, so I removed logfile and added this to /etc/msmtprc:

# The logs will appear in /var/log/mail.log because of the rules in /etc/rsyslog.d/50-default.conf
syslog LOG_MAIL