I am running a local Postfix server. it runs fine for submission on port 587. I use this as it actually gets a lower bounce rate than Amazon SES and various other commercial SMTP providers that I have tried (believe it or not). As much of the advice on this forum advises, I used mail-receiver for inbound on port 25. Works fine. But, bounces using the VERP regex do no get through. I cannot solve this. So I turned that off and spent a lot of effort to install Dovecot and set up POP3 in conjunction with Postfix. My domain is [something].space. and the user for inbound for the General category is [something]@[something].space. I now have a local mailbox for that user which Discourse polls via POP3. [Better to hide the real names to avoid spam I think.] So there is just that one user for inbound. But bounces come back to the VERP regex you have to set. And they can’t be delivered anywhere because there is no such user ‘replies’. Here’s the mail.log entry for an example of mail purposely sent to a non-existent address: [something] postfix/local[218189]: 068272FEA4F: to= , relay=local, delay=0.01, delays=0/0/0/0, dsn=5.1.1, status=bounced (unknown user: “replies”) [Domain again edited for security.] Help would be very much appreciated. Please don’t ask me to revert to mail-receiver, as that had exactly the same issue, and I would prefer to use Dovecot/Postfix at this stage. I am sure others have a similar setup with success. Herre is the VERP setting: replies+%{reply_key}@.space

Still not able to receive bounce notifications

Andro (Andrew Bernard) September 15, 2024, 1:16am 2

Aha. I changed ‘replies’ to the [something] user name in the VERP regex, and voila! Success.

Sorry for the noise but I hope this topic may be useful to others in the future.

Topic		Replies	Views
Bounces not being received in Discourse with local Postfix server Product Support email , mail-receiver	2	206	December 9, 2024
Zero entries in bounced email list Product Support	3	853	April 10, 2021
From / Reply / bounce email issue Product Support	9	2568	May 23, 2016
Seeing smtp_should_reject "400 bad request" failures on bounce processing Bug mail-receiver	13	616	November 24, 2025
Bounced emails not being detected Product Support email	16	1871	February 7, 2024