The MacDeskBlog

The mail server migration is done. The “soft bouncing” functionality of postfix (the mail server included in Mac OS X Server these days) appears to have retained some (all?) of the previously undeliverable messages and delivered them once I straightened out the configuration.

I know some of you out there are running servers, and some of those are running Mac OS X Server or some flavor of Linux running postfix. So, I’ll share some of my experience. Initially, I just migrated one domain from my old Mac OS X 10.0 server to my new Mac OS X Server 10.4 machine. That migration was pretty simple and painless. I set up the new server for the macdesktops.com domain, changed DNS and mail started arriving on the new server.

I have several other domains for pet projects and for friends. When I tried to move them to the new server, things started to break down. My test messages didn’t get through, and some of them didn’t generate bounce messages. The main challenge I had over the past week was figuring out the correct settings for myhostname, mydomain, and virtual hosting. The conclusion I arrived at last night is that virtual hosting either doesn’t work, or is simply too counterintuitive for me to figure out using the limited documentation I was able to find and reference. Once I removed the new domains from the virtual hosting configuration and adding them into the host name aliases, everything started to work. Using the Server Admin utility for Mac OS X Server, this entailed navigating to Mail - Advanced - Hosting in the utility, then deleting each domain name from the lower text box on the screen before entering it into the upper text box, and finally unchecking the “Enable virtual hosting” checkbox.

If you find yourself configuring a new postfix environment, particularly in Mac OS X Server, I recommend trying to steer clear of virtual hosting. Instead, try to configure the server by adding in host name aliases rather than virtual hosting domains. Doing so should make the process much easier.