Still not able to receive bounce notifications

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 canā€™t be delivered anywhere because there is no such user ā€˜repliesā€™. Hereā€™s the mail.log entry for an example of mail purposely sent to a non-existent address:

[something] postfix/local[218189]: 068272FEA4F: to=<replies+verp-7d39e178a71b450220c072608e269da7@[something].space>, relay=local, delay=0.01, delays=0/0/0/0, dsn=5.1.1, status=bounced (unknown user: ā€œrepliesā€)

[Domain again edited for security.]

Help would be very much appreciated. Please donā€™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

Aha. I changed ā€˜repliesā€™ 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.

4 Likes

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.