Postfix MTA - new try

All right, all right - I have to admit, Postfix has it's advantages...

Turns out having quota and warnquota configured it's impossible to get warnquota warnings delivered to an external recipient. Setting the MAILTO environment variable does not make any difference (believe me, I've tried..). It always sends to localuser@localdomain, where localuser is the user who's violated the quota. I.e. all warnings with nullmailer are sent as localuser@mydomain to the outside world ;(

However, it turned out that postfix handles this better. First of all it recognizes local mail recipients and doesn't use the relay host for those. Secondly, local users can be aliased to external e-mail addresses (!). Since I'm new to all this I didn't bother exploring it in detail, but by adding a line like this in /etc/aliases :

localuser: localuser remoteuser@remotedomain

then run the postfix command:

newaliases

Now I get mails delivered both to the local /var/mail/localuser and to the remoteuser@remotedomain.

Naaajs....!

sasl stuff turned out the same for my ISP Glocalnet as well as for Google. For one reason or the other, the second attempt with postfix worked out (I didn't try relaying through smtp.gmail.com though). Don't ask me why it works now - I still claim IT guys are pervs.. :)


When installing Postfix you get a few options to choose from. Make yourself a big favour by choosing the right one:

Internet Site--This would be your normal configuration for most purposes. Even if you're not sure of what you want, you can choose this option and edit the configuration files later.

Internet Site Using Smarthost--Use this option to make your internal mail server relay its mail to and from your ISP's mail server. You would use this when you don't have your own registered domain name on the Internet. This option can even by used with dial-up Internet access. When the system dials up the ISP, it will upload any outgoing mail to the ISP's server, and download any incoming mail from the server.

Satellite system--Use this option for setting up a relay that would route mail to other MTA's over the network.

Local system--Use this option for when you're just running an isolated computer. With this option, all email would be destined for user accounts that reside on this stand-alone client.


For me the right choice was Internet Site Using Smarthost (make sure 'inet_interfaces = all' in main.cf for receiving to work). Togeather with this hint, I can now both send and receive e-mail for accounts on my system (wow!). Guess who's going to remote control.stuff@home ;)

BTW - I never configured either a MTA, cron or quota ever before. Given that, I think having done this in two-three days is not too bad.