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CaptSaltyJack
Asked: 2013-05-11 20:36:59 +0800 CST

How to route email to a script

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What I'd like to do is set up an address like [email protected] which will take whatever email it gets and run the full message as STDIN into a shell script. I can't seem to get this working though. Tried a couple solutions, including this one:

How can I route some emails to a script in Postfix?

But my setup is a bit different. I've got the Postfix/Dovecot/MySQL setup, so all email is handled by Dovecot, and Postfix reads its maps from MySQL. Whatever I add to master.cf doesn't seem to work. SpamAssassin has a line in there and that's working fine. I'm stuck!

EDIT: I really wish people would read carefully before downvoting my question. I am using MySQL for my alias maps, so /etc/aliases does not work, I already tried that of course.

email

5 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Obviously will work Douglas Land's answer, with a little addition.
    Suppose you have only localhost.localdomain at $mydestination in main.cf.
    Then add a virtual alias :

    [email protected] -> [email protected]

    In main.cf you will need:

    alias_maps=hash:/etc/aliases

    Then add to /etc/aliases :

    somelocaluser: "|/your/script/here"

    newaliases+postfix reload and you are good to go.

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  2. You can pipe an entry to a script via /etc/aliases, RE:

    foo: "|/your/script/here"

    modify /etc/aliases then run newaliases and reload the postfix process.

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  3. I'd go with Procmail. We use this to parse all sorts of mail out to worker scripts and IRC bots for notifications.

    Here is an example of how to handle email. http://linuxgazette.net/issue14/procmail.html

    Relevant short example done here for ease:

    1. Create a local user called handler, for example.

    2. Go to handler's home directory and create a file called .procmailrc containing:

    :0
| $HOME/bin/my.script

    This will pass the entire inbound email to the script $HOME/bin/my.script through STDIN.

    Also here is where I got help with Procmail when I was first trying to pass email to a script: How to use procmail to get a message into a variable

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  4. I would check if sieve supports piping to a script. Dovecot supports sieve scripts.

    As alternative you can use "procmail" as MDA between postfix an dovecot. Procmail can pipe to a script.

    (that said I wonder why Douglas Land's answer does not work, mysql as backend should not make a different?!)"

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  5. Something that hasn't been mentioned is that you can use more than one lookup table (separated by comma or space):

    virtual_alias_maps = mysql:/etc/postfix/mysql-virtual.cf
alias_maps = mysql:/etc/postfix/mysql-aliases.cf hash:/etc/aliases

    The first one (virtual_alias_maps), will search for an email and return a username (for example: [email protected] -> info1234).

    Then, the second one (alias_maps) will search for a username in your database, if not found, will search it at /etc/aliases. This way, you can still manage your aliases in MySQL and set your scripts in /etc/aliases, and no need to append "@localhost.localdomain" to the local users.

    To test if your setup is correct, use:

    postmap -q [email protected] mysql:/etc/postfix/mysql-virtual.cf
postmap -q info1234 mysql:/etc/postfix/mysql-aliases.cf hash:/etc/aliases

    Using Local accounts with aliases in MySQL:

    In one of my custom setups, I'm using local accounts for users and MySQL for aliases only. So this is how I set it:

    virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/vusers
smtpd_sender_login_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/vusers
virtual_alias_domains = /etc/postfix/vhosts
alias_maps = mysql:/etc/postfix/mysql-aliases.cf hash:/etc/aliases

    As you can see, feel free to mix them anyway you want.

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