Mail for user of one domain being delivered to admin of another

I broke something, because it *was* working.

On my ISPConfig install I have two sites. One is "www.strangenoises.org", the other is "www.tantalus.org" <not really, real name obscured>. Each "site" has co-domains set up, "strangenoises.org" and "tantalus.org" respectively, plus some others.

Mail addressed to [email protected] is turning up in my inbox ([email protected]). That mailbox is also the defined Admin and Catch-All address for the strangenoises.org domain. 'jim' is the defined admin and catch-all address for tantalus.org. There is no 'jim' user in the strangenoises.org domain.

(btw, I've defined no username prefix, so "[email protected]" maps to actual user "jim" and so on.)

I've no idea why the tantalus.org mail is coming to me. Here is what I find.

When it happens, mail.log shows:

Code:

Sep 20 21:48:35 aziza postfix/local[16308]: 79EF43444E47: to=<[email protected]>, orig_to=<[email protected]>, relay=local, delay=2.9, delays=0.1/0.01/0/2.8, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (delivered to command: /usr/bin/procmail -f-)

... which doesn't give me much clue as to why it did it. It's happening both to incoming mail from outside, and from mail sent through the same server (by me, testing).

/etc/postfix/localhostnames does contain:

Code:

tantalus.org
www.tantalus.org

/etc/postfix/virtusertable does contain:

Code:

[email protected] jim
@www.tantalus.org jim
[email protected] jim
@tantalus.org jim

What's going on? More importantly, how can I fix it?

I'm still hunting myself, and in a slight hurry! If I'm true to form, I'll probably post my own answer which I can't possibly find until I've posted the question. :-}

P.S. It's an Ubuntu Feisty server with Perfect Setup (following the howto here) and ISPConfig 2.2.16, all recently installed. I did recently change the IMAP/POP3 server from courier-imap to dovecot (to solve problems with some users using Apple Mail.app) but I can't see how that would break *this*.

 

Hmm. It looks like it, but I'm having a surprising amount of trouble fixing it nonetheless. Also, it's not quite clear how it ever worked (which it certainly did). I'd changed myhostname from aziza.strangenoises.org to mail.strangenoises.org - but that would still have made mydomain automatically strangenoises.org; I'd never set mydomain specifically.

I've set mydomain specifically to a domain I don't actually receive mail on, and I've removed that domain from the co-domains listed for my site; I even changed the MX record for that domain to point to another. But it's still writing that domain out to local-host-names. Even when I delete those lines specifically from that file, they reappear when it's rewritten (as you'd expect), but I don't know why it's doing it; what in the ISPConfig configuration is telling it to do that.

 

I had to empty the recycle bin.

That looks like an ISPConfig bug. It writes out config for stuff that's in the recycle bin

 

Still broken, can't fix

I thought that would fix it, but it doesn't. My attempts to fix it based on that just kept ended up getting the "mail loops back to myself" error instead.

At the moment it's just reverting to sending the mails to me as site admin, with no error.

This was an interesting but ultimately unsatisfying thread too, as I find myself agreeing with NETabuse. postfix configuration "virtual_maps" is no more, as of current versions of Postfix.

Code:

root@aziza:/etc/postfix# postconf virtual_maps
postconf: warning: virtual_maps: unknown parameter

It's in the file

Code:

root@aziza:/etc/postfix# grep virtual_maps main.cf
virtual_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtusertable

But I do wonder if Postfix is taking any notice of it. I note however:

Code:

root@aziza:/etc/postfix# postconf virtual_alias_domains virtual_alias_maps virtual_maps
postconf: warning: virtual_maps: unknown parameter
virtual_alias_domains = $virtual_alias_maps
virtual_alias_maps = $virtual_maps

Which appear to be the default. So maybe it does still read it, via that. Certainly changing virtual_alias_maps to point directly at virtusertable, and unsetting virtual_alias_domains didn't help.

And it does seem wrong to be listing all the virtual domains in mydestination rather than using virtual_alias_domains.

But, that's how I've got it set up at the moment.

Code:

root@aziza:/etc/postfix# postconf myhostname mydomain myorigin
myhostname = aziza.strangenoises.org
mydomain = strangenoises.info
myorigin = /etc/mailname
root@aziza:/etc/postfix# cat /etc/mailname
strangenoises.org

/etc/postfix/local-host-names does not list strangenoises.info anywhere.

As can be seen above, I set myhostname back to the same name as listed in Management->Server->Settings, as per the last post in that referenced thread, it made no difference.

 

Just to add, the result in mail.log while the above is as it is, is:

Code:

Sep 21 14:50:03 aziza postfix/local[11422]: 0D7203444E4B: to=<[email protected]>, orig_to=<[email protected]>, relay=local, delay=4.5, delays=0.14/0.01/0/4.4, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (delivered to command: /usr/bin/procmail -f-)

 

I'm not. There's no error message.

(See above.)

 

Yes, I appear to have been talking out of my arse, as a side-effect of the stress. You know what it's like when you know you're haemorrhaging mail...

With settings as detailed above, which look right to me, I am not getting loops-back error messages, the mails are just being pushed to me instead.

 

I get the loops-back when I change myorigin (via /etc/mailname) back to mail.strangenoises.org instead of just strangenoises.org. I think that's where the confusion came from, as i initially tried that too.

That's because it then redirects the mail to [email protected] which is indeed not in local-host-names. But it shouldn't be doing that redirect anyway!

 

No.

I did as you said. Now I get:

Code:

Sep 21 15:17:56 aziza postfix/local[12357]: 3E1063444E4B: to=<[email protected]>, orig_to=<[email protected]>, relay=local, delay=0.31, delays=0.12/0.01/0/0.18, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (delivered to command: /usr/bin/procmail -f-)

It really doesn't seem right anyway. I said it was myorigin that was set to strangenoises.org, not mydomain.

 

oh wait, maybe it did work. 'jim' seems to think he received it anyway...

I think I might be starting to understand why...

 

Yeah, it seems to be fixed; that last time I think I was just misconstruing.

I'll concede if it had said [email protected] I would have sussed what was going on However, I'm not running very *many* users/sites, and I wanted the convenience of 'normal' usernames on the system.

It may be that I shouldn't be using ISPConfig but webmin or something. Or just do it by hand, but I wanted to be lazy and paid the price.

I'm still not really understanding why it is the way it is.

myorigin seems to be *supposed* to be the domain that's appended to locally-generated mails.

"The domain name that locally-posted mail appears to come from, and that locally posted mail is delivered to. The default, $myhostname, is adequate for small sites. If you run a domain with multiple machines, you should (1) change this to $mydomain and (2) set up a domain-wide alias database that aliases each user to [email protected]host."

Ah, "and that locally posted mail is delivered to". Even so, strangenoises.org on its own still resolves to the same machine. hm, but is an entry in virtusertable that points to me.

Code:

@strangenoises.org rachel

OK, I think I get it now.

 

To summarise then, for the next person with this problem; not only must $mydomain not appear in /etc/postfix/local-host-names, but $myorigin should:

• - be a hostname, not a domain name
• - be listed in /etc/postfix/local-host-names (to avoid loops-back)
• - not be listed in /etc/postfix/virtusertable

To that end it seems to be vitally important not to add the value in $myorigin as a co-domain, but only to add it manually at the bottom of local-host-names.