I can send mail locally and externally but when receiving mail externally for local virtual domains Postfix drops the mail with the error ‘Relay access denied’ in the log file.
I’ve done a lot of debugging of this issue and after a lot of research and trial and error I’ve come to conclusion that it’s a problem with my virtual_alias_maps file.
After playing around with the virtual_alias_domain parameter and removing $virtual_alias_maps and adding mydomain.com the mail server would successfully accept external mail.
Since there will be a number of virtual machines on my server I’d rather fix the automated Virtualmin process and get it working with the default virtual_alias_domain: $virtual_alias_maps parameter.
If I’m right something in the following configuration for virtual_alias_maps is throwing off the domain parameter:
#excerpt from the /etc/postfix/virtual file
jake@tridentphotography.com.au tridentphotography
abuse@tridentphotography.com.au jake@tridentphotography.com.au
webmaster@tridentphotography.com.au jake@tridentphotography.com.au
postmaster@tridentphotography.com.au jake@tridentphotography.com.au
hostmaster@tridentphotography.com.au jake@tridentphotography.com.au
As a note, I didn’t install Virtualmin with the installer and have configured everything manually.
Any help getting this working would be appreciated.
The Relay Access Denied error you’re getting suggests that Postfix thinks it needs to send that email elsewhere, that it’s not trying to deliver it locally.
One possibility is that the “Mail for Domain” feature might not be enabled for that particular domain. You can check that in Edit Virtual Server -> Enabled Features.
Another thing you may want to verify… this is handled automatically when installed with the install.sh, but requires a tweak when installed manually – you’d want to make sure that in /etc/postfix/main.cf, that you have a line like this:
virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual
Also, if you go into System Settings -> Re-Check Config, does it notice any problems?
I’m not really a Postfix expert (far from it), but in the configuration that Virtualmin performs in Postfix when you install it using the installer script (which is by the way the highly recommended way), the directive “virtual_alias_domains” is not used at all.
Virtualmin creates a local Linux user for every email user, and puts an entry in the virtual_alias_map, mapping the email address of the user to its Linux username.
I personally have configured Vmin to always include the full domain in usernames, separated by “@”. Example: “user@example.de”. Virtualmin then creates two Linux users, “user@example.de” and “user-example.de” pointing to the same user ID (because soem services have problems with @ in usernames).