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Thursday, 22 August 2019

Mail forwarding and piping emails with Postfix for multiple domains

The past few weeks I've been learning about mail servers, and the biggest takeaway for me is that it's generally worth paying someone else to handle the headache. As usual, the obstacles to configuring a mail server correctly are primarily in the lack of useful documentation and examples, so I'm putting this down here in the hopes that it'll be helpful to like-minded constructively-lazy devs.

While I'm happily using mailgun for mail sending (after much frustration I threw in the towel trying to integrate DKIM packages with Postfix to get my outgoing emails secured) I was certain that I could at least have my mail server handle mail-forwarding for my multiple domains, and while that proved to be fairly straightforward I then tumbled down a rabbit-hole trying to get Postfix to pipe certain emails to a node.js script for processing.

    Here are the steps you'll need to take:

  • Set up your A and MX records for your domain, the A record @ pointing to the IP address of the server you’re going to be receiving emails on and MX with the hostname @ and the value 10 mail.your-domain-name

    If your mail server is not the same as your primary A record, simply create an additional A record mail pointing to the correct IP address.
  • sudo apt-get install postfix
    Select "Internet Site" and enter your-domain-name (fully qualified)
  • sudo vi /etc/postfix/main.cf
    • Add mail.your-domain-name to the list of mydestination values
    • Append
      virtual_alias_domains = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual_domains
      virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual
      to the end of the file
  • sudo vi /etc/aliases
    curl_email: "|curl --data-binary @- http://your-domain-name/email"
  • sudo newaliases
  • sudo vi /etc/postfix/virtual_domains
    example.net   #domain
    example.com   #domain
    your-domain-name   #domain
    (the #domain fields suppress warnings)
  • sudo postmap /etc/postfix/virtual_domains
  • sudo vi /etc/postfix/virtual
    info@your-domain-name bob@gmail.com
    everyone@your-domain-name bob@gmail.com jim@gmail.com
    email_processor@your-domain-name curl_email@localhost
    @your-domain-name catchall@whereveryouwant.com
    ted@example.net jane@outlook.com
  • sudo postmap /etc/postfix/virtual
  • sudo /etc/init.d/postfix reload

You should be able to find your postfix logs at /var/log/mail.log. Good luck!

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