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Martijn Heemels
Asked: 2011-06-15 23:05:21 +0800 CST

Prepend X-header to all relayed messages in Postfix

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I've got several production servers running a LAMP stack. They each have a local Postfix server catching any mail from the system and from PHP, and relaying it via a smarthost (the SendGrid SMTP service).

I'd like to add a custom header to every outgoing message sent to the smarthost. This allows me to filter statistics per server in SendGrid. Something like:

X-SMTPAPI: {"category": "www1"}

The Postfix docs mention using the PREPEND action in a Postfix 'access' table. So, I added the following line to /etc/postfix/access:

PREPEND X-SMTPAPI: {"category": "www1"}

and hashed the access file with postmap.

However, I have no idea how to use the map. Something like the following doesn't work:

smtp_client_restrictions = check_client_access hash:/etc/postfix/access

How do I make Postfix prepend this header?

smtp postfix smtp-headers sendgrid

3 Answers

  1. This answers your exact question: https://web.archive.org/web/20150706131729/http://hoursofop.tumblr.com/post/17760274650

    Quick steps reported here:

    • create a file /etc/postfix/sendgrid_headers and add this line to it:

      /^From:/ PREPEND X-SMTPAPI: {“category” : “Category Name”}

    • update your master.cf file with the following lines:

      smtp      unix  -       -       n       -       -       smtp -o smtp_header_checks=regexp:/etc/postfix/sendgrid_header

    It applies to a Ubuntu system and worked perfectly for me. Be careful to choose the right "smtp" line in master.cf. I used a tab to indent the -o line.

    Also note that SendGrid strips out the X-SMTPAPI header from the email before it is sent on - so you won't find it there but you will see the category appear within the SendGrid dashboard.

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  2. You seem to have mis-spelled header_checks as smtp_client_restrictions, which isn't even the correct spelling of the wrong parameter. ☺

    This sort of thing is far better done with a simple shim around sendmail, that your PHP (or whatever) scripts are configured to use, you know. The shim script would be a simple exercise in the use of the cat and echo commands. The MTS is really the wrong place to be doing this.

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  3. I had a similar problem with Sparkpost: I needed to add their custom header in order to set some delivery options.

    This problem (adding a custom header to all emails) has many different solutions.

    My solution is using Postfix header_checks and prepending the custom header to the "From" header.

    • Create a new file, named /etc/postfix/my_custom_header:

      /^From:/i X-MSYS-API: { "options" : {"transactional": true} }

    • Edit /etc/postfix/main.cf (appending to the bottom):

      # Add custom Sparkpost X-MSYS-API header to all mails
header_checks = regexp:/etc/postfix/my_custom_header

    • reload Postfix configuration (this command is for Debian Wheezy, and may be different on your OS)

      service postfix reload

    EDIT: Unfortunately, this method adds the header to all emails (incoming and outgoing). I am still searching for a method that adds the header only to outbound emails.

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