[Dovecot] Vacation messages come from POSTMASTER, not user

cfowler cfowler at scss.tcd.ie
Mon Nov 26 20:21:05 EET 2012


On 26-11-2012 17:59, Ben Morrow wrote:
> At  5PM +0000 on 26/11/12 you (cfowler) wrote:
>> Problem : All vacation autoreplies come from the postmaster address.
>> Expected behavior : vacation notice comes from the user who set the
>> vacation.
>> Platform : Dovecot 2.1.7 on Debian Squeeze ( See below for example
>> reply, sieve script and dovecot -n output)
> <snip>
>
>>    sieve_vacation_dont_check_recipient = yes
>
> Why have you set this? Normally vacation will refuse to respond to a
> message which doesn't have your address in one of the recipient 
> header
> fields; in fact the standard says that it MUST NOT respond unless 
> this
> is the case. This setting turns that check off, in which case 
> Pigeonhole
> will send a vacation response (despite the standard) but sends it 
> from
> Postmaster. I assume this is done for privacy reasons, since the 
> person
> the vacation response is being sent to doesn't necessarily know the 
> user
> who set the vacation exists, or what their address might be.
>

This feature is the reason I've upgraded to 2.1.7 from 1.2.15

Our users have addresses like bmorrow at foo.com
We also store aliases for them in LDAP like ben.morrow at foo.com. Postfix 
knows of these aliases and accepts mail for them. Most of our users 
prefer to hand out this alias as their email address

Mails to bmorrow at foo.com were receiving vacation auto-replies as you'd 
expect in 1.2.15
Mails to ben.morrow at foo.com were not due to the infamous "discarding 
vacation response for message implicitly delivered to bmorrow at foo.com" 
message.

I know the correct behavior is for the users to write a correct sieve 
script with an addresses: line, but that's not going to happen 
unfortunately. The users just want "Push button to make vacation go".

> If you send a message with the user's email address in To:, do you 
> get a
> vacation response From: the correct address?
>

No, mails to bmorrow at foo.com also get Postmaster replies.
With 1.2.15 we were at least getting autoreplies from bmorrow at foo.com 
when a mail was sent to bmorrow at foo.com.

> Ben



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