Contents

Introduction

How To Debug How A Message Is Processed By The ESA?

Related Information

Introduction

This document describes how to use the Trace tool to debug how a message is processed through the Email Security Appliance (ESA).

How To Debug How A Message Is Processed By The ESA?

If you have ever wondered how messages are processed and interpreted through the ESA, or if you have a specific issue with a message not being processed as expected, you can use System Administration > Trace from the GUI, or trace in the CLI, to debug the flow of messages through the system by emulating sending a test message.  Trace can be a powerful tool to help troubleshoot and debug, especially if you have combined many of the advanced features available on the ESA.

Trace emulates a message as being accepted by a listener and prints a summary of features that would have been triggered or affected by the current configuration of the system (including uncommitted changes).

Note: The test message is not actually sent.

After you have entered the values as shown in the video, click Start Trace.

A summary of all features configured on the system affecting the message is printed.

You can upload message bodies from your local file system using the Upload Message Body option. (In the CLI, you can test with message bodies you have uploaded to the /configuration directory.)

An illustration of how to use Trace is shown in the video below:

Note: The sections of configuration tested by the trace command listed are performed in order. This can be extremely helpful to understand how the configuration of one feature affects another. For example, a recipient address transformed by the domain map feature will affect the address as it is evaluated by the recipient access table (RAT). A recipient that is affected by the RAT will affect the address as it is evaluated by the alias table, and so on.

Tip: See the online help from your appliance GUI for full, detailed information.  First, click System Administration > Trace to visit the Trace tool, and then select Help and Support > Online Help from the upper right-hand corner of the GUI.

Related Information

- Cisco Email Security Appliance - End-User Guides

- Technical Support & Documentation - Cisco Systems