On Thursday 17 April 2008 23:50:40 mouss wrote:
But today I received spam mail (which was correctly identified as such by amavisd-new) for "info@example.org" and "sales@example.org", two recipient addresses that do not exist. According to [1] "it's left up to the non-Postfix delivery agent to reject non-existent recipients from local submission or from local alias expansion."
note that this is about local submission and local alias expansion. it is not about mail received from outside.
How to deal with such a situation?
this is postfix issue. postfix will reject mail to invalid local and virtual users unless you rebak recipient validation. a common error is to use wildcard virtual aliases or wildcard canonical mapping.
Thank you for your reply! Reading through it and re-reading the Postfix documentation gave me the clue I needed.
Unfortunately I forgot to mention that I didn't have a virtual_mailbox_maps directive defined in Postfix's main.cf, so Postfix couldn't know anything about which virtual recipients were valid and which weren't. Since that particular map was optional and everything worked fine during my tests (which didn't include sending mail to an invalid virtual recipient, shame on me) I quickly forgot about it.
Naturally that was the root of problem I was facing.
Defining a virtual_mailbox_maps file with all valid virtual users solves the problem in principle, however now I need to maintain two files with valid virtual users for valid virtual domains: the passwd-file for Dovecot (/etc/dovecot/passwd) plus the vmailbox file for Postfix (hash:/etc/postfix/vmailbox).
I suppose this is unavoidable when using flat files and would be better solved using a real database backend, but it makes me wonder if there really isn't anything Dovecot could do about this?
Seeing as Dovecot recognises when a virtual recipient is invalid, couldn't it somehow put the to-be-rejected mail back to Postfix (or whichever MTA)? Or should it just drop it? I don't know what the SMTP (whichevery protocol is to be followed here) says about this, so I pose the question again:
Is there anything Dovecot itself can do to reject or handle mail to invalid virtual users? Or does this situation *have* to be dealt with earlier, by the MTA?
Andreas
Andreas "daff" Ntaflos Vienna, Austria
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