Topic awaiting preservation: postfix, fetchmail, mailman

Okay, Linux time.

I've got an ISP email account. The account as set as a "catchall" -- anything sent to a nonexistent user on my domain goes to that account.

I've got a Linux box. It can send and receive email as a client PC, but it's not a mail or web server on its own. I can point a browser at its IP, or I assume I could send email to user@123.456.7.890 and have it go through, but it doesn't have a DNS entry of its own. It thinks its name is eva.alanmacdougall.com, since all Linux PCs (seem to) need a fully-qualified domain name.

Here's what I want to do. I want to be able to send an email to jrandomluser@alanmacdougall.com -- this will result in the message appearing in catchall@alanmacdougall.com.

Then, I want to use fetchmail on my local Linux box to retrieve the email from the POP3 account catchall@alanmacdougall.com.

Finally, I want postfix to deliver the email locally IF a user (or alias) called jrandomluser exists, and forward the email to a different remote account if not.

My ultimate goal is to run a few mailman lists in this fashion. If someone sends mail to listname@alanmacdougall.com, I want that email to find its way to my local box for processing (since "listname" will be aliased to the appropriate mailman commands in /etc/postfix/aliases).

So far, I've only got part of the equation. If, from my local Linux box, I attempt to mail to a local user who doesn't exist, postfix forwards the email to noise@alanmacdougall.com, just as I want it to. And if I send mail to a remote user (anyone@alanmacdougall.com) who doesn't exist, the email does appear in catchall@alanmacdougall.com. However, when I use fetchmail to get the remote email, postfix isn't distributing it to the correct local users. It's not even bouncing it to noise@alanmacdougall.com, like it does with local incorrect mail.

Here's what I've done to get to this point:

In postfix's main.cf, I've turned off local_recipient_map and set "luser_relay = noise@alanmacdougall.com". This means that mail for nonexistent local users is bounced to noise@alanmacdougall.com, and it seems to be working.

In fetchmail, I've set all email from the catchall@alanmacdougall.com account to be handed to the local user or alias of the same name.

My actual .fetchmailrc says:

poll pop3.alanmacdougall.com protocol pop3

    localdomains alanmacdougall.com

    aka alanmacdougall.com

    no dns

    user catchall/alanmacdougall.com there

    with password mypassword

    to * here

    dropdelivered

(Note: the "catchall/alanmacdougall.com" notation is required by my ISP.)

Here's the problem: when I run fetchmail in test mode, fetchmail finds messages on catchall@alanmacdougall.com, and seems to say that it delivers them to the appropriate account (username@alanmacdougall.com)... but then the local account doesn't actually get the email. And, well, that's where I'm stuck. Up until now, I've been getting a steady flow of error messages or whatnot that I could Google around on, but with this iteration of my problem there's not much to go on.

Any of our sysadmin types (*coughpugzlycough*) have any idea?

Well, I'm making progress... now my problem seems to be more postfix than fetchmail.

I can receive emails and distribute them to local users, because postfix's main.cf has mydestination: alanmacdougall.com, eva.alanmacdougall.com.

This means that if incoming mail is for foo@alanmacdougall.com, it'll be delivered locally, like I want.

The trouble is that if I try to mail something to foo@alanmacdougall.com, it'll be delivered locally. There doesn't seem to be any way out of this.

What I really want is for all mail received by fetchmail to be delivered locally, and all other mail to be sent out over the wild internet.

Any ideas?

Well, I finally managed to solve my problems. So, everything worked out for the best.