postfix aliases file (in light of setup, sendmail, and exim)

[Chris Ricker]

On Wed, 21 Apr 2004, Warren Togami wrote:

> One issue with changing postfix to share the same aliases file as other 
> MUA's is that postfix disallows mail delivery to root by default. 
> Because of this the root alias MUST be configured manually.  Has a 
> solution to this been proposed?

Just for the record, since there's a lot of misinformation floating through 
this thread about it:

Postfix 2.0 (and Postfix 2.1, which ships tomorrow, and would be good to 
slip into FC2 given the Exchange 2003 b0rkages it works around) can 
deliver to root, provided that the "local" MDA included with Postfix is 
used. Postfix 1.x cannot deliver to root at all.

Postfix 2.0 / 2.1 cannot deliver to root if any 3rd-party MDA (such as
procmail) is used. That's not something that can be "patched around" as one
poster suggested -- it's inherent to the whole privilege-separation design
of Postfix.

Currently, RHL / RHEL / FC have all shipped with Postfix configured to use
local as the MDA, so delivery to root isn't an issue per se.  However, all
have shipped with root aliased to postfix due to historical baggage (Postfix
1.x refused to run even local as root.  Wietse trusts his own code more now
;-). However, they all include the commented-out line

# mailbox_command = /path/to/procmail

In the past, switching from local to procmail simply required uncommenting 
that. If the alias is removed, documentation will have to be updated to note 
that switching to procmail (or maildrop, or whatever) also requires aliasing 
root. I can't think of any other impact it would have....

There's also the issue that aliasing root is a good default policy, so in 
some ways it'd be a regression for Fedora to change that for Postfix....

At any rate, all of this has all been beaten to death already in Bugzilla.

later,
chris