I'm setting up postfix on a local network. I've got everything working fine. Mail sent locally to postfix is stored on the mail server and retrieved using POP3 from the mail clients. Postfix correctly sends email out to the internet when it should so all is well with the world.

What I would like is to omit the @hostname from name for local mails. So if ann wants to send an email to bob she can just send it to "bob" rather than "bob@mailserver". All mail sent is from a mail client which is configured with mailserver as the SMTP host so it should hit the mailserver whatever the name is.

I guess what's required is for postfix to understand that a mail received with no hostname should be assumed for localhost. I thought this must be something to do with aliases but I can't quite figure out what.

Any help greatly appreciated.

It works on my server, here, with default settings. Do you have any logs when you try bob without the @server?

Hi ugob.

It works for me sending mail from the server to other accounts on the same server. The problem comes when I send it from a remote client.

However, I think I've sort of figured out the problem. When I send mail to "bob" from a mail client, it automatically appends the hostname of the client. Kmail has the ability to configure a default domain for sending mail, so if the clients are kmail the problem can be solved.

Unfortunately Mozilla mail client, for example, doesn't see to have this ability. With Mozilla I have worked around by creating entries in my address book for "bob@mailserver" and if I type "Bob", Moz helpfully pulls out the right address.

I don't know if there's a better way round it. Since the mail does have an @xxx extension by the time it gets to postfix, the only way round it that I can see would be to configure postfix to treat all mail with a local domain as local to that server. So bob@homer.acme.com and bob@marge.acme.com would hit the mailserver.acme.com box and be forwarded to local mailboxes for bob and marge.

Maybe I could do this with procmail, but I don't know how right now.