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Email Aliases in Mac OS X Server

By Adam Knight » Posted on October 4, 2006 - 3:45pm
Rick asks:

Question

On my OS X.4.7 Server the mail destined for the postmaster has suddenly started to disappear. The log shows:

Sep 25 14:32:12 postfix/local13838: 53E04AD1E8: to=, orig_to=, relay=local, delay=0, status=sent (delivered to file: /dev/null)
Sep 25 14:32:12 postfix/qmgr13049: 53E04AD1E8: removed

The mail is getting through my Barracuda without any problem and this is only affecting the postmaster account. I have deleted and re-created the account and it has not solved the problem.

Why is the mail being redirected to root and then to file: /dev/null ?

Answer

Something overwrote your aliases file, aliases database, or removed the postmaster account or alias you made. The default aliases file includes these two items:

	
    
		
  1. Person who should get root’s mail. Don’t receive mail as root!
    2. 
	

#root:          you


	
    
		
  1. Basic system aliases — these MUST be present
    
MAILER-DAEMON:  postmaster
    
postmaster:     root

Thus, root has no address and postmaster is sent there. poof goes the mail. This is default.

The Hard Way

To change, either uncomment the line for root and send it somewhere, or change the line for postmaster to someone useful.

If you change the file, run the following commands as root so the changes take effect:

postalias /etc/aliases
newalias
postfix reload

The Mac Way

Go into Workgroup Manager and give someone the alias postmaster or postmaster@yourdomain.com. Works instantly.

Downside: Sieve filtering won’t catch it. But that only matters if you’re using Sieve.

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About Adam Knight
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Author Biography

Adam Knight is one of the founders of Mac Geekery and is a geek at heart. Programmer by day, hacker by night, his daily life revolves around the Macintosh platform, which he has been a user and programmer for since the early days of System 7 when his LCII replaced his Apple //c.

In-between tech jobs, he’s managed to learn the basics of any web hacker: PHP, MySQL, Perl, Apache, Linux, *BSD, and the intricacies of ./configure —prefix=~/bombshelter/. Today, codepoet is concentrating on blogging again, writing some software for the Mac by himself (including Notae) and for his company (such as Switchblade) and has a few other toys coming out soon.

Bug him over AIM or email [link fixed].

It set me in the right direction, but…
Rick on October 6, 2006 - 9:01am

…this is what happened.

Something overwrote your aliases file, aliases database, or removed the postmaster account or alias you made. The default aliases file includes these two items:

Yes it did and this was in fact the problem.

# Person who should get root’s mail. Don’t receive mail as root! #root: you

# Basic system aliases – these MUST be present MAILER-DAEMON: postmaster postmaster: root Thus, root has no address and postmaster is sent there. poof goes the mail. This is default.

The Hard Way

To change, either uncomment the line for root and send it somewhere, or change the line for postmaster to someone useful.

I changed the line:

postmaster: root to postmaster: postmaster

because I have a user named postmaster and I’ll explain this later.

Editing the file on the console is quite easy but saving that file back is not. The server essentially says no way. I tend to use Textedit and the workaround I have found is to save the Textedit file to the desktop and then drag it into the directory. The server then asks you to authenticate and all is well.

If you change the file, run the following commands as root so the changes take effect:

postalias /etc/aliases newalias postfix reload

This didn’t work at all. I probably didn’t go about it the correct way, being a bit of a noob. This is the transcript of my Terminal activity.

Last login: Fri Oct 6 08:39:56 on console Welcome to Darwin! mydomain:~ admin$ sudo postalias /etc/aliases Password: postalias: fatal: open /etc/aliases.db: Permission denied mydomain:~ admin$ sudo newalias sudo: newalias: command not found mydomain:~ admin$ sudo postalias /etc/aliases postalias: fatal: open /etc/aliases.db: Permission denied

WTF! So…

mydomain:~ admin$ sudo newaliases mydomain:~ admin$

Ahhhh…it worked and everything is set right.

The Mac Way

Go into Workgroup Manager and give someone the alias postmaster or postmaster@yourdomain.com. Works instantly.

Downside: Sieve filtering won’t catch it. But that only matters if you’re using Sieve.

Yes, this does work instantly. However, mail is sent to the users’ account on the client. If this user wants to reply as “postmaster” their email header shows their real account name and not their alias as postmaster.

Having a real account named postmaster allows a response from postmaster@ourdomain.com rather than from somebody@ourdomain.com. People tend to see messages from the postmaster as rather more compelling than a message received from “Bob”.

The rub here is that I fixed the problem and I thank you for the help.

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