Hi, We are noticing couple of strange problems with postfix in our environment. They are as follows:
We have a relay server, which is extensively used internally in our organization. This server receives email for one email domain (let's day domain.com for example) and uses alias tables to route the emails to several backend mailbox servers. More precisely: All the emails will be sent to @domain.com addresses. So this server find the corresponding alias entry in one of the alias hash tables and then sends the email to the alias defined in the alias tables. Example alias table entries: USER1: ali...@mailbox-server1.domain.com USER2: ali...@mailbox-server2.domain.com etc. a. postfix/smtpd : receives the email properly. Since we have smtpd restrictions configured, emails will be rejected for unknown recipients. b. postfix queues the email c. postfix/local : tries to find the alias in the alias tables before sending the email. Here is the actual problem. Once in a while (one or two emails in a month or so), postfix/local fails to find the USER entry in alias tables (though the entry exists) and bounces the email with either of the following messages: 1. "unknown user" (this is really strange, if the user were unknown, postfix/smtpd would have rejected the recipient at SMTP connection itself) 2. "mail forwarding loop" for x...@domain.com (though we are pretty sure that the mail came to this server once - i mean not looping b/w the servers) In all the cases we observed, postfix/local fails to find the entry in alias tables. This server handles almost 70000 emails daily and works perfectly except the bugging issue I mentioned above. Few details regarding our environment are as follows: postfix-2.2.9-10.25.3 (O.S: SLES 10) Any inputs to resolve this would be appreciated. Thanks in advance. Thanks, Satish
