First, I thank everyone who has been kind enough to provide me with guidance. I appreciate it very much.
Second, I wish to recap my present situation so that any remaining misunderstandings on my part are exposed to your observation and comments. The background is this. We are moving from a Sendmail/Cyrus-imap based system of many years to a Postfix/Cyrus-imap based email system. During the transitions the existing Sendmail/Cyrus-imap service naturally remains active. We have replaced all our Sendmail MX hosts with Postfix installations. In preparation for switching over we are also routing our message traffic through Postfix on the new Cyrus-imap host (neither of these two hosts are listed in the MX records of any of our domains. It is this temporary routing arrangement that appears to have been the source of many of my difficulties. What I have done at this point is this. User accounts / domains are defined in hash:/etc/postfix/virtual according to the specifications in man 5 virtual and assigned to the variables $virtual_aliases and $virtual_alias_domains in main.cf. Our standard aliases entries, including internal administrative distribution lists, are mapped in /etc/postfix/aliases.main and this map is assigned in main.cf. Because we are temporarily routing all message traffic through the new host we also have a transport map for each of the virtual and actual domains that we service. The local host's FQDN is of course a member of one of those domains. example.com relay:[current.sendmail.delivery.host.example.com] .example.com relay:[current.sendmail.delivery.host.example.com] Now these are my conclusions that I would like checked: When this host receives an email for a virtual domain that is mapped in the virtual aliases file: someuser@virtual.domain localalias The remapped address ends up as localal...@localhost.example.com. I believe that what our provisional setup has caused is the transport map for .example.com scoops up this local address and relays it. Had there been no transport map for this domain then the local delivery agent would have been triggered and the standard aliases map used. And perhaps I would not have been quite so confused. When I add this to my transport map: localhost.example.com local: Then someuser@virtual.domain ends up passing through localalias in the aliases map and being expanded, as I had expected all along. This also happens when the transport map for .example.com is removed, as will eventually be the case when this host becomes the final delivery point. If I have finally gotten this straight then I would appreciate having it confirmed. If I am still lost then I would appreciate being told so. -- *** E-Mail is NOT a SECURE channel *** James B. Byrne mailto:byrn...@harte-lyne.ca Harte & Lyne Limited http://www.harte-lyne.ca 9 Brockley Drive vox: +1 905 561 1241 Hamilton, Ontario fax: +1 905 561 0757 Canada L8E 3C3
