Postfix: send all bounce messages to postmaster

Question

The situation is that we have a number of guests, say 80, sending through a central mail infrastructure out to the web. The way the network is setup the mail server cannot necessarily initiate connections back to each of the senders.

I understand I can disable bounce messages completely by turning disabling the bounce daemon but I'm concerned if I do this I will miss system-problems. What would be good if all bounces went to postmaster and I could look for them there. There is no reason to ever try to contact the senders back.

Any ideas how to achieve this? Googling mentioned NOTIFY=NEVER and some stuff about smtpd_command_filter although what I'm doing feels like it should be simpler than that. I can get the bounce messages to postmaster using notify_classes but I think that relies upon the bounce daemon.

I'm running CentOS 5.5 and postfix 2.3.3-2.1.el5_2

EDIT:

soft_bounce=yes seems to be another way to disable bounces, but this is not exactly what I want

Answer 1

In main.cf set notify_classes=bounce and bounce_notice_recipient=postmaster (which should be the default. And then postmaster gets the copies of every bounce message.

You MUST NOT disable bounces. They are needed to notify the sender! And as there has to be a sender for a mail, this particular sender will be informed.

What do you mean by "cannot necessarily initiate connections back to each of the senders"? The server never initiates a "connection" to the sender. It delivers a bounce into the inbox of the sender. And don't tell me that you allow people to send mails without having an account at the mail system.

Answer 2

Using canonical_maps to rewrite all local, Postfix-generated addresses should allow you to set the envelope address (different from the sender) and have the bounces returned to a central postmaster address. Maybe http://s19n.net/articles/2011/postfix_nullclient.html can give some hints:

/etc/postfix/main.cf
myhostname = host.example.com
canonical_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/canonical

/etc/postfix/canonical
@host.example.com   alert@example.com