I've been doing some tests with normal (foo@domain), catch-all (@domain), and plussed (foo+foo@domain) addresses, with the virtual(8) delivery agent, and virtual_alias_maps and virtual_mailbox_maps.

The idea is to check the setup of users who want both redirection and delivery to a local mailbox (with Dovecot, and Maildir format). This worked as I expected, except in one case: when mail is sent to an unknown recipient, and the catch-all setup is used, it's not possible to both redirect the incoming mail, *and* have it delivered to a local mailbox. Is this expected? It looks like a bug, because the destination MTA (the one that receives the redirect) gets a badly-formed RCPT. Tests as follows, with the virtual_alias_maps file being 'valias', and the virtual_mailbox_maps file being 'vmailbox', and the local domain being example.com:

(1) Mail to known user 'f...@example.com':

valias:   "f...@example.com   f...@example.com, f...@external.org"
vmailbox: "f...@example.com   example.com/foo/"

This works: external.org gets the mail, and Dovecot also gets the mail from mailbox 'foo/'.

(2) Mail to unknown user 'unkn...@example.com':

valias:   "@example.com   @example.com, f...@external.org"
vmailbox: "@example.com   example.com/foo/"

This fails: external.org doesn't get the mail, but Dovecot does get the mail from mailbox 'foo/'.

The mail log at external.org shows that Postfix did try to redirect the mail, but sent it to an invalid address:

Recipient address rejected: User unknown in virtual mailbox table; from=<f...@example.com> to=<"unkn...@example.com, foo"@external.org>

Second question: with my current setup, an entry is created in virtual_alias maps even if the user doesn't want redirection, but only wants local delivery. In other words, if user 'bar' wants local delivery, then the file entries are:

valias:   "b...@example.com  b...@example.com"
vmailbox: "b...@example.com  example.com/bar/"

This works, and doesn't seem to cause a problem. I don't really want to change the software to remove this (unnecessary) entry in valias. Are there likely to be any problems with this?

Reply via email to