Comments on: FreeBSD: postfix, dovecot, MUA – virtual domains, virtual users

By: Paul P.

Paul P. — Tue, 24 Sep 2019 12:27:15 +0000

Thanks!! I’ve caught the logics and found another article: https://medium.com/mudita-misra/postfix-forward-email-to-another-email-account-a8d027fa18eb
The most important thing is that besides of editing virtual_alias_maps, in postfix main.cf there should be installed an option named `virtual_alias_domains ` and it should match all domains provided for the virtual folders. I.e.

virtual_alias_domains = domain-one.com domain-two.net domain-three.org

Then we should update the postmap and reload the postfix – and voila! Emails are forwarded to the system’s user account :)

Thanks for you help and tips!

By: Kliment Andreev

Kliment Andreev — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 16:16:50 +0000

In reply to Paul P.. See if this works. You'll have to configure the destination user as a local user. It might not work, just a guess. Or, as you said, you can use cron to copy from one /var/mail/office to /var/spool/. Mind that local users might use mailbox instead of maildir.

By: Paul P.

Paul P. — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 12:00:45 +0000

In reply to Kliment Andreev. Not a problem at all! But I have another question: is there a way to *forward* all messages coming to a virtual box, to the email box of a real user in the system? Could this be configured in postfix/main.cf or somewhere else? For example, now I have a real user named 'office' and its mail is in /var/mail/office. I have thought that I could code a crontab task, which collects and copies all incoming virtual mail to the end of the /var/mail/office file (so then this file is worked out by Dovecot and it's accessible by my regular email client), but may be there is some easier way... thanks a lot!

By: Kliment Andreev

Kliment Andreev — Thu, 19 Sep 2019 13:51:48 +0000

In reply to Paul P.. Dovecot v1 and v2 differ a lot. I don't have any plans to work on a version for v1. Sorry...

By: Paul P.

Paul P. — Thu, 19 Sep 2019 12:09:00 +0000

Thank you for this great step-by-step tutorial! The Postfix part worked for me on Postfix 2.9.4.
Is there any way to get the solution for Dovecot 1.2.16?
Seems there is no way to upgrade to Dovecot 2.x, but the version 1.2.x has another set of files, not mentioned in your tutorial.

By: marcel-plouf

marcel-plouf — Mon, 20 Aug 2018 10:31:00 +0000

Thanks for this tutorial. It worked great for me with FreeBSD 11.1, I just had to uncomment ssl_dh parameter in ssl.conf dovecot file and generate the dh.pem file with `openssl dhparam -out /usr/local/etc/dovecot/dh.pem 4096`

By: Gminfly

Gminfly — Sat, 20 Jan 2018 17:10:29 +0000

In reply to Kliment Andreev. Yes I am using FreeBSD 11.0, but everything seems to work yet dovecot just refuses... Apache is so simple, I don't get why mail is still so complicated.

By: Kliment Andreev

Kliment Andreev — Sat, 20 Jan 2018 16:41:24 +0000

In reply to Gminfly. If you are using FreeBSD 11+ and newer versions of postfix, this tutorial might not work.

By: Gminfly

Gminfly — Sat, 20 Jan 2018 15:37:47 +0000

I followed your blog and get an “Error: Internal auth failure”
as well as an “Error: userdb lookup failed: Internal error occurred.”

log just says
auth: Error: Master requested auth for nonexistent client …

Somethings amiss here

By: mbeichorn

mbeichorn — Thu, 06 Nov 2014 05:11:04 +0000

I had the same problem. That periodic emails were not getting to the email address specified in /etc/aliases for root. What was happening was that emails sent to root were sent off to root@example.com by postfix.

To fix this use ‘localhost’ instead of ‘example.com’ for myhostname, mydomain and myorigin in the postfix main.cf