First Post and hopefully last :-) Postfix "emails header not set correctly" question

Virtualmin
1

Everything is working great so far. I only turned off clamav and spamassassin for memory reasons (256mb server …) But I have a question regarding “email headers” and virtualmin.

I can see the following email headers when I click on “view all headers” in Thunderbird.

Received: from myown.server by bay0-mc1-f28.Bay0.hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.4675); Fri, 26 Nov 2010 19:16:16 -0800
Received: by myown.server (Postfix, from userid 0)
X-Mailer: Webmin 1.520

myown.server is the hostname of the VPS (not the domain name of the virtual server).

I would have expected the domain of the virtual server (which is correctly set in the FROM address when I send emails through webmin) instead of the hostname.

I tried all kind of settings, but I am not able to figure it out. Is it possible to configure this?

Just to clarify the FROM address is set correctly. The question is only about the “Received:” field in the email header.

Thanks again for any help in advance!

PS

Thanks for virtualmin. I installed it on a centos 5.5 VPS to manage low two low-traffic domains. Probably not very cost effective, but I do it because for fun and learning :slight_smile: Virtualmin is just great. I was used to shared hosting and control panel, but Virtualmin is much better!

2

Howdy,

I would have expected the domain of the virtual server (which is correctly set in the FROM address when I send emails through webmin) instead of the hostname.

Yeah, what you’re seeing there is the name Postfix identifies itself as (which is your hostname by default), rather than the domain name of the sender.

So, for any email sent from your server, it’ll always display your hostname in the Received field (as well as a reverse DNS lookup of your IP address).

-Eric

3

Yep, Eric explained it correctly.

There’s several places where host/domain names come into play: The “From:” line in the mail itself, which you see in the mail client and which email senders basically can set to whatever they want, then the “Envelope From” that is passed in the “MAIL FROM” protocol command, and which often gets added to the mail in extension headers, and the hostname that the server uses in the “220 greeting” and the “HELO” protocol lines.

The latter is what you see there in the “Received: from” line and should match the RDNS record of the IP address of your server for best anti-spam rule compliance.

So using the hostname there is the right way to go.