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Frerich Raabe
Asked: 2012-09-20 22:58:42 +0800 CST

How can I make exim deliver a single incoming mail to multiple local maildirs?

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I'm maintaining an IMAP server running FreeBSD which uses exim 4.80 as its MTA. Right now I try to create an email alias so that I can address all users of the system for informing them about scheduled downtimes and the like. The idea is that a mail to [email protected] should get forwarded to all users on the system.

I initially considered having a simple simple /etc/aliases entry but noticed that it's not what I want since users of the system may have Sieve filters in place which drop all incoming mails except a few whitelisted ones.

I did notice that exim can be made to deliver to a local Maildir directory straight away (by-passing any other MDA and thus bypassing Sieve filters) using the appendfile transport - but how can I make a single incoming mail to vmailusers get redirected to multiple local maildirs?

freebsd

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You can use the redirect router to process alias messages. This is also the one which runs scripts / forward files given by the users. The processing of the routers happens from top to bottom, so the example below works roughly like this:

    1. The syswide_alias router checks aliases in the /etc/aliases file. If one is found, the routing sequence restarts.
    2. The forced_delivery makes the same check, but this time it uses the original_local_part variable which is empty if no forwarding were done. If the lookup is successful, the message is delivered. In this case the processing stops (since a delivery was done), so any filters or forwards the user might have are ignored.
    3. If the forced_delivery router declines, the .forward file will be processed. If this file contains aliases, the routing sequence restarts.
    4. Finally, the message gets delivered to the user's mailbox. This will happen only if the filter file in the previous step didn't result in a significant delivery (that is, it doesn't contain a forward alias, or doesn't drop the message entirely).

    The routers section should look like this:

    syswide_alias:
    driver = redirect
    allow_defer
    allow_fail
    data = ${lookup{$local_part}lsearch{/etc/aliases}}

forced_delivery:
    driver = accept
    allow_defer
    transport = local_delivery
    condition = ${if eq {${lookup{$original_local_part}lsearch{/etc/aliases}}}{}{no}{yes}}

user_filters:
    driver = redirect
    allow_defer
    allow_fail
    allow_filter
    file = ${home}/.forward

normal_delivery:
    driver = accept
    check_local_user
    transport = local_delivery

    Both the syswide_alias and the forced_delivery routers have the allow_defer option, which is needed if the file is not found (which is probably won't be the case, but it doesn't hurt anyway)

    Edit: The above example now contains a full set of routers needed to achieve the goals of the question.

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