[ postfixadmin-Patches-1901104 ] domain aliases without bounces/backscatter

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Patches item #1901104, was opened at 2008-02-25 02:42
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by lenix
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Category: Core
Group: None
Status: Open
Resolution: None
Priority: 5
Private: No
Submitted By: Guido Boehm (lenix)
Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Summary: domain aliases without bounces/backscatter

Initial Comment:
see http://sourceforge.net/forum/message.php?msg_id=4678100
for full problem description.

in short:
the current mechanism to do domain-aliasing (joh...@al... goes to joh...@re..., fo...@al... goes to fo...@re..., ...) is to insert a record into the alias-table, like address:@alias.com goto:@real.com. unless @real.com has catchall configured (address:@real.com, goto:us...@re...) this solution will generate bounce-mails. postfix will accept all mail for @alias.com, and only afterwards notice that there's no such user @real.com. this "backscatter"-problem makes you unpopular among other postmasters, so you would better try to avoid bouncing many messages.

unfortunately, the only way to handle such situations in postfix without producing backscatter involves creating another table and modifying some main.cf configuration.

this patch adds an alias_domain table to the setup, includes documentation for postfix-configuration and adds proper listing and forms for handling those alias-domains. it can peacefully co-exists with the "old" way to do domain-aliasing, that means that @alias.com -> @real.com in 'alias'-table will keep working, but it'll still have the same problems described above.

since there are new forms/errors/... there are a lot of new strings to translate, i'll provide a german translation myself the next days. Do these new items have to be added to DOCUMENTS/LANGUAGE.txt?

regarding PgSQL, i tried to support it everywhere i added new queries, but since i have no postgres-installation at hand i didn't test the relevant parts. it would be nice if somebody could provide some feedback/fixups on this topic.

have fun,
guido 'lenix' boehm

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>Comment By: Guido Boehm (lenix)
Date: 2008-04-05 02:26

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Hello Chris,

thanks for testing :-)

It does mean exactly what you described, although it works for
(regular) aliases configured for foo.com, too.
So if you happen to have a "fhk...@fo..." alias defined in
your example (2), an email to "fhk...@ba..." would be accepted
and delivered to whatever turns to be the target (goto/..) of 
"fhk...@fo...".

Next to this you could configure additional addresses which exist
only for "bar.com", but would be rejected for "foo.com".

Let me know if there's anything left unclear to you, it is
currently 2:20am over here, so i might sound a bit confusing
again..

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Comment By: Chris Nolan (chris_nolan)
Date: 2008-04-04 23:57

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Hmmmm, this looks useful although I'm *slightly* confused about it... 

Does this patch in effect mean that 

1) if I have user1, user2 and user3 set up as mailboxes on foo.com then I
alias bar.com to foo.com that postfix will now automatically accept all
mail for us...@ba... us...@ba... and us...@ba... and they will be
delivered to us...@fo... us...@fo... and us...@fo... respectively?

2) that any mail to an unknown user "fhk...@ba..." that is not set up
as a mailbox on foo.com will be rejected with a 550 response?

Anyway, the patch applies very nicely against revision 316 too (there is a
2 line difference somewhere, but it applies fine).

You need to add a line to templates/menu.php at line 26 for the new
feature to be available from the admin menu:

   $submenu_domain .= _menulink("create-alias-domain.php",
$PALANG['pMenu_create_alias_domain']);

Hope you can answer my two questions!


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Comment By: Guido Boehm (lenix)
Date: 2008-02-25 02:44

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oh, and patch is diff -pruN against svn 299

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