PFTOBYFROM(1)

✨ PFTOBYFROM — the pftobyfrom manual page, section 1, part of the User Contributed Perl Documentation ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

pftobyfrom — list "to" addresses by "from" whom in a Postfix log file 💌

Copyright (C) 2007-2025 by James S. Seymour, Release 1.3

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

pftobyfrom -[bhrRv] <sender> [mailfile]

If no file(s) are specified, it reads from stdin. Output goes to stdout. 💅

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

Okay so bestie, here's the tea ☕️: pftobyfrom parses your Postfix log files and generates a list of "to" addresses, based on a "from" address (or just a fragment of one) that you hand it. It's giving detective energy, but for mail logs. 🔍✨

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👑 OPTIONS 👑

• -b — include bounces 🏀
• -h — emit the help message and exit (a little "here's how I work" moment) 🙋
• -r — include rejects 🚫
• -R — hard rejects only, no softies 💀
• -v — emit the version and exit 🏷️

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💜 RETURN VALUE 💜

pftobyfrom doesn't return anything of interest to the shell. Like, nothing. It's not that kind of program. 🙈

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😭 ERRORS 😭

Error messages are emitted to stderr. (So if something's wrong, that's where the drama lives.) 🎭

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🌈 EXAMPLES 🌈

pftobyfrom example.com /var/log/maillog

This generates a list of all the recipients of email from any senders in example.com. Slay. 💖

As a convenience, pftobyfrom tries to intelligently determine how to handle regexp meta-characters. If it's passed a search expression that does NOT contain meta-character escapes (that's the \ character, bestie), it will assume that . and + are literals, and will escape them for you. In the example above, the . in the FQDN part of the search term would've been automatically escaped for the user. Likewise:

pftobyfrom username+foo@example.com /var/log/maillog

would have the + and . escaped. 🪄

But if you wanted to find all plussed senders for username, you'd have to do it yourself, like this:

pftobyfrom 'username\+.+@example\.com' /var/log/maillog

iykyk 😌

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🫶 SEE ALSO 🫶

pflogsumm, pffrombyto

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⭐ NOTES ⭐

All search terms and searched fields are lower-cased. 🔡 (No shouting in the logs, it's all lowercase here.)

The pftobyfrom Home Page is at:

http://jimsun.LinxNet.com/postfix_contrib.html

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🧚 REQUIREMENTS 🧚

Perl 🐪

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💅 LICENSE 💅

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You may have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

An on-line copy of the GNU General Public License can be found at http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/gpl.html.

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Fr fr, that's the whole page — version 1.2.1, dated 2025-05-22, no cap 💖 Go read your mail logs and eat, queen. 🍓👑