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F-cked up trying to set up a mail server (having close to zero Linux experience for the moment) I just want to stop loosing incoming messages (it's about current used company's mail server, with pretty a flow of incoming mail from partners and potential clients I can't afford to loose) and have a normal weekend and sleep a night to come back with a mind refreshed. Please, how can I configure postfix so that it just accepts all the mails send to it and put somewhere (reporting a sender successful delivery) for further processing. I'd like no user/mailbox/domains/security management. Just accept any message came from the outside to the server, save it and forget.

The system is Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server (Lucyd Lynx x86-64).

Have my sincere enormous thanks in advance if you help me to take a break. I like the Unix way and Linux in particular very much and enjoy digging into it, but am just a humble red-eyed noob yet and need some sleep while can't just give up even for a moment.

3 Answers 3

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The most reasonable way to handle this is to issue "postfix stop" and go home. The clients will retry delivery for a few days.

Postfix makes it somewhat hard to completely "open up" the system as you want to. Also, this really won't do what you expect. The mails will be delivered then and dispatching them to their intended recipients will give you a bigger headache than you might expect now.

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  • > The clients will retry delivery for a few days. Potential clients looking to contact the company will most probably think that the address is incorrect and not come back. While with my solution I'll dispatch all the messages manually and deliver them to sales staff on Monday morning. > Postfix makes it somewhat hard Maybe some other MTA then? Exim, Qmail, Sendmail, ... ?
    – Ivan
    Jul 10, 2010 at 7:12
  • BTW I've set everything working already with postfix+Zarafa yesterday, but then came shocked by the fact Zarafa has only one hardcoded codepage supported - cp1252 (and no Unicode). While I need at least cp1250 and ISO-8859-2 too. And that Zarafa failed to uninsall cleanly, leaving it's pieces in mail configs here and there.
    – Ivan
    Jul 10, 2010 at 7:14
  • By the way, simply a genius idea s to issue "postfix stop". At least the mail will go to the old mail server (which is now second in priority listed with an MX DNS record) of a contracted ISP (which, I'm pretty sure, still maintains it, but will expect to be paid again if we want to access those new messages). What I am going to do now is stop postfix, go to the datacenter, format the new server's hard drive, install Debian 5 instead of Ubuntu 10.04 and use iRedMail to set up mail. Thank you.
    – Ivan
    Jul 10, 2010 at 7:38
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    When I said, the clients will retry, I meant, the SMTP delivery processes of the mail servers that try to deliver mail to you. These do retry delivery for quite some time. No client with his Outlook mail program is in direct contact with your mail server. If you still have an old mail server there, all the better then. ;-)
    – unixtippse
    Jul 10, 2010 at 14:20
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Pay for a backup mail service, ideally one which can be deployed as soon as you sign up, and then add it to dns immediately. There are a number of companies providing this sort of service, I've used mtgsy in the past when a client's server failed and it started collecting their emails almost straight away. GFI have a similar product which is pretty nice, but deployment time is somewhat longer and more complicated.

Of course this does rely on your being able to change the mx records in dns, though I guess there's nothing stopping you adding some form of port forwarding to redirect connections. Just be careful not to create loops.

If you've got the money then just leave this running once you've fixed your own mail server - it's always nice to have some redundancy. If not then make sure you have your own server online again before any 30 day trials the service provider may have.

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You could do a postfix catch all as mentioned in this http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2003110323024816

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