More Postfix complaints

The user login system has now been converted over to Postfix. Now I just have the system that handles mailing lists to go, which will be more annoying since that's where qmail shines. I don't have any per-list mail configuration right now, and I think I'm going to need some for Postfix. We'll see; there might be some special trick for Mailman. I'm planning on going to Debian Mailman at the same time, so this will be quite a project. Not this weekend, I think.

I think I have Postfix doing what I want, but it certainly isn't as easy to configure as qmail was. It can do more, but I kept having to chase things down. For example, subparts of addresses aren't inherited through alias maps, so when I have an alias like racc: eagle-racc, mail to racc-request just goes to eagle-racc, not eagle-racc-request. Okay, fine, that's a configuration setting I can change. Except then it doesn't work. Oh, I see, -request is handled specially and I have to turn that off. That actually makes sense, but for moderation addresses, it's not so useful.

Then I tried to set up relay recipient limits, since that was one of the points of this whole exercise, only to discover that, once again, subaddressing is not handled in any useful fashion. If I limit relaying for windlord to eagle@windlord, eagle-racc@windlord stops working. Bleh.

So I have to use a PCRE map for recipient addresses, so that I can use regexes to match subaddresses. Wow, the documentation for how to do that sucks. I finally figured out that I didn't need to run postmap for a PCRE map (and in fact it does nothing useful, happily and successfully) and the reason why what I was trying to do wasn't working had nothing to do with the recipient address map and was due to the relay domains configuration, since there you have to say eyrie.org to match all subdomains rather than .eyrie.org. Apparently we're in the middle of some sort of semantics conversion. Feh.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still going to use Postfix, for a lot of different reasons. I'm a bit tired of djb's weird licenses, qmail isn't being actively developed, and we definitely have to run Postfix for work so I want to start learning it. But after going through the exercise of conversion, I'm just confirming that I like how qmail works better, and I particularly think the configuration is vastly superior.

Oh, the final annoyance is that Postfix is now happily trying to deliver mail to system users with random system directories as home directories, which means that if I ever get one that happens to own its own home directory for some reason, Postfix will happily write files into it. And there isn't any way to tell Postfix to not bother trying to deliver mail to any user with a UID below 1000 unless there's an alias for them. This is bullshit. I stopped having to care about this sort of thing when I stopped using sendmail, and now I have to go make a map of all my legitimate local users (and remember to update it every time I create an account) just to convince Postfix that delivering mail to sync is stupid? And worse, until I do that, that mail is accepted and then bounced, making Postfix a great backscatter bounce source (although, admittedly, still not as bad as qmail). Brilliant.

Posted: 2005-07-03 23:39 — Why no comments?

Last spun 2022-02-06 from thread modified 2013-01-04