Re: [exim] Catchall catching everything

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Author: Philip Hazel
Date:  
To: Antony Gelberg
CC: exim-users, Chris Cowen
Subject: Re: [exim] Catchall catching everything
On Tue, 18 Jan 2005, Antony Gelberg wrote:

> Got it, thanks for the very useful and obvious tip! The systam_aliases
> director looked up fe, and mapped it to ferenc. However even though ferenc
> was a local user, exim then attempted to lookup ferenc with system_aliases
> rather than deliver to his mailbox.


That is how it is specified. Aliases are allowed to redirect to aliases.
However, that does give a problem with defaults.

> I have "fixed" this by moving the localuser director above system_aliases, so
> that it runs first. Question is, am I running the risk of breaking anything
> by doing this? It seems to me that localuser would always need to be above
> system_aliases to avoid this problem, so I wonder why the default was as it
> was.


The default, in a traditional system that does not use catchalls, allows
aliases to aliases, typically

hostmaster: root
postmaster: root
abuse:      root
root:       manager-on-duty


If you know that you never have one alias pointing to another, then you
can safely put the localuser router first.

Another way of solving your problem is to use the redirect_router
option. (In Exim 4, that is. From your use of "director", it seems you
are using Exim 3. That is 3 years out of date, and I can't remember if
it had that option. Look in its documentation.)

-- 
Philip Hazel            University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@???      Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
Get the Exim 4 book:    http://www.uit.co.uk/exim-book