Can't copy Undeliverable Mail

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Level 1

5 points

Can't copy Undeliverable Mail

I am running Mail on a Mac OS 10.4.2 xServer and find that the GUI setting "Copy undeliverable messages to" does not work as explained in the manual. When I check this option and enter the postmaster account, it does not copy but forwards all undeliverable messages to the postmaster's account. When I check the file /etc/postfix/mail.cf the line is added luser_relay = postmaster.

On page 70 of Apples Mail Service Administration Manual, it indicates that the /etc/postfix/mail.cf file needs to be modified to add luser_relay = postmaster "To set up forwarding of undeliverable incoming mail;" not copy.

The problem is if I forward undeliverable mail to the postmaster, the user does not get a message like they did on a 10.2 server indicating the message was not delivered.

Does anyone know how I can get the message to bounce back to the original sender and have a copy go to the postmaster at the same time?

xServer, Mac OS X (10.4.2)

Posted on Nov 16, 2005 9:49 AM

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Answer 1

pterobyte

Level 6

11,104 points

Nov 16, 2005 9:57 AM in response to John Helter

No simple solution that I know of. Sorry.

You are obviously free to configure your mail server to your liking, but in my experience >90% of all incoming mail to "unknown" users is spam anyway. So I wouldn't bother copying the postmaster.

Just my 2 cents.

Alex

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Answer 2

John Helter Author

Level 1

5 points

Nov 16, 2005 10:14 AM in response to pterobyte

Thanks for the quick response. That will only partially solve my problem. When I uncheck the GUI "Copy undeliverable message to" and send a message from my computer using the mailserver to an address with a typo, OS 10.4 Mail will not deliver but gives the user a warning message to use a different server. Users ofter send to a group that may have 1 outdatedd address and this will stop anyone in the group from receiving the message.

So I am stuck with forwarding?

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Answer 3

pterobyte

Level 6

11,104 points

Nov 16, 2005 10:55 AM in response to John Helter

OK. I can see your problem.

Well, at least users are forced to fix the faulty address immediately. By getting a bounce later most users won't 😉

I know this is not the answer you were looking for so here you go (although I actually think user education never hurts and have not implemented this on my high traffic servers ;-):

Are your users being forced to use SMTP authentication to send? If not make sure you have this in place as the first step. This is important so that your security is not compromised.

Now look at your /etc/postfix/main.cf and towards the end look for

smtpd recipientrestrictions = .......

You'll see something along these lines:
smtpd recipientrestrictions = permit saslauthenticated, reject unauthdestination, permit_mynetworks, reject rblclient sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org, reject rblclient relays.ordb.org, permit

See if it includes reject unauthdestination and/or reject unverifiedrecipient and remove those.

This should do the trick (not knowing your configuration there is always a chance something doesn't work as expected).

The drawback is that this is now true for all senders and thus mail will get accepted first and bounced later if for unknown users.

You can "finetune" this so that it applies only to your local users, but this requires quite a bit of fiddling around with your configuration and will "break" Server Admin. If you don't mind, see the following page for more info or ask again 😉
http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html

Alex

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Answer 4

John Helter Author

Level 1

5 points

Dec 23, 2005 8:56 AM in response to pterobyte

The xServer update to 10.4.3 corrected the problem. Thanks for the help.

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