[tor-project] TPA-RFC-83: Mail log retention

anarcat · March 18, 2025, 7:34pm

Summary: extend the retention limit for mail logs to 10 days

# Background

We currently rotate mail logs daily and keep them for 5 days. That's
great for privacy, but not so great for people having to report mail
trouble in time. In particular, when there are failures with mail sent
just before the weekend, it gives users a very short time frame to
report issues.

# Proposal

Extend the retention limit for mail (`postfix` and `rspamd`) logs to
10 days: one week, plus "flexible Friday", plus "weekend".

## Goals

Being able to debug mail issues when users notice and/or report them after five days.

## Tasks

Adjust logrotate configuration for syslog-ng and rspamd.

## Scope

All TPA servers.

## Affected users

Sysadmins and email users, which is pretty much everyone.

## Timeline

Logging policies will be changed on Wednesday March 19th.

# References

TPA has various log policies for various services, which we have been
meaning to document for a while. This policy proposal doesn't cover
for that, see [tpo/tpa/team#40960] for followup on that more
general task.

[tpo/tpa/team#40960]: Document our privacy-preserving webserver log setup for the world (#40960) · Issues · The Tor Project / TPA / TPA team · GitLab