email subaddressing under CentOS 5.2/Postfix

quiescere · 03-17-2009, 02:55 PM

Hello—

I want to enable subaddressing (plus addressing, detail addressing, address extensions, whatever you want to call it) on my mail server. I've found a few guides but they have all related specifically to IMAP servers. Many of my users don't bother with POP or IMAP. (I still use mail occasionally myself.)

Unfortunately, I know very little about how subaddressing actually works. It seems like it could just be a matter of setting a postfix configuration option to allow subaddressing, postfix will then dump everything with the appropriate username portion in the appropriate mailbox, and then users' procmail rules can handle it from there.

Any information at this point would be helpful, as I am completely out to sea here and my usual peers all looked at me blankly when I asked about it.

Thanks—
quiescere

billymayday · 03-18-2009, 11:57 PM

The usual way is to enable the recipient delimiter parameter (typically recipient_deliter = +) and then you can use .forward+ to determine the action.

For example, on my system, amavisd adds user+badh to mail with bad headers. In my home directory, I have a file .forward+badh that contains

Code:

~/Maildir/.Badh/

and mail is deliverd to the .Badh subdirectory.

billymayday · 03-19-2009, 12:09 AM

From the postfix documentation page

Code:

recipient_delimiter (default: empty)

    The separator between user names and address extensions (user+foo). See canonical(5), local(8), relocated(5) and virtual(5) for the effects this has on aliases, canonical, virtual, relocated and on .forward file lookups. Basically, the software tries user+foo and .forward+foo before trying user and .forward.

    Example:

    recipient_delimiter = +

quiescere · 03-19-2009, 09:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by billymayday

The usual way is to enable the recipient delimiter parameter (typically recipient_deliter = +) and then you can use .forward+ to determine the action.

Thanks much for this. The only other things I had to do were change the procmail command in /etc/postfix/main.cf:

Code:

mailbox_command = /usr/bin/procmail -a "$EXTENSION"

and of course, pull my hair out until I remembered to run postmap on the affected file.

Thanks much for your reply.

billymayday · 03-20-2009, 01:36 AM

What did you need to run postmap on?