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My company has recently decided to update our mail server and I've been tasked with inventorying all of our applications that use the existing server to send email so that we know which systems we need to test for the changeover. The company has been around a while, and did not have a formal software development team until a few years ago.

This resulted in a few decades' worth of one-off scripts most of which are neither listed nor maintained. Recently I was volunteered to inventory all the scripts/applications that use the old mail server so we'll know which systems to test during the changeover. I've managed to get the task narrowed down to the applications on one particular Windows server and the code in our recent TFS repository, but definitively cataloging even just that one server seems like a tall order.

My current plan is to just cut Agent Ransack loose looking for something like

^.*(SMTP|mailserverHostname|mailserverOtherHostname|mailserverIP).*$

and manually dig through the results. I'm a developer, only ever pretended at sysadmin, and definitely have no idea what I'm doing. This is just the best I could come up with.

Is there any more effective/automated way I could go about the task of finding every vb/perl/python/c script that deals with that mail server?

user8675309
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1 Answers1

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Here is an approach that I've used in the past. Rather than look at all of the possible clients that were connecting to the mail server, I looked at the logs on the mail server's end. In my case, I was able to look through the mail server's logs, filter out requests that came from the associated client software (GroupWise), and what was left was stuff coming from other applications. By reviewing the subject lines, we were fairly quickly able to determine what applications were connecting to the mail server and using it to send messages.

Doug Deden
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