Postfix Delivery Transports
Postfix offers delivery for four different classes of recipient addresses: local, relay, virtual alias, and virtual mailbox. How you configure the domains you accept mail for determines the delivery method used by Postfix. The following are the delivery transports used by Postfix:
- local
Delivers mail on the local system. Each address has an account on the system or comes from the local aliases file (historically /etc/aliases). Delivered messages go to the system’s mail spool or mail files in individual home directories. Deliveries are handled by the local delivery agent or passed to a custom delivery program. Lists local domains in the
mydestinationparameter.- relay
Delivers mail to other systems, usually on the same network. Relay domains are generally configured on gateway systems when Postfix accepts mail for an entire network. The gateway system relays messages to the correct internal mail system. Deliveries are handled by the relay transport, which is simply a clone of the
smtpagent, but it is optimized for making deliveries to internal systems on a local network. Lists relay domains in therelay_domainsparameter. Mail relaying is discussed in Chapter 9.- virtual
Delivers mail for virtual mailbox domains. Virtual mailbox domains are used for hosting multiple domains using a separate mail spool that contains mailboxes for many separate domains. Email users typically do not have system accounts on the mail server. Lists virtual mailbox domains in the ...