The old address will phase out eventually. There aren’t many users. How do I go about this? I’ve read the documentation (especially VIRTUAL_README), but still can’t figure it out for my case. On top of this one question bugs me: if there are no UNIX accounts for virtual mailboxes then what’s with the passwords for them?
If your two domains have exactly the same users and they all have local accounts, all you have to do is tell postfix to accept both domain names in email, you don’t need virtual domains. The setting is mydestination in /etc/postfix/main.cf.
Then for all intents they are separate mail domains and you need to go the whole hog with virtual domains and virtual users. Here is a tute for Debian, but hopefully can understand the principles from the discussion on virtuals.
Thanks for the link. I read it, and it is useful as something that should be learned. In the article the main idea for virtual domains is if you have plenty of users on each domain. This is not my case, so some stuff might be overkill (SQL DB, I guess). Beside of having only several users, I should provide vacation (when some user tells me to turn vacation auto-responder on and off). In my old configuration I knew how to do this (ie. su user and run vacation), but how to do it when there are no Unix accounts?
Another problem I have is qpopper configuration for virtual domains. In qpopper FAQ there is a line saying that I actually have to have two Unix accounts for two separate mailboxes. If I want to go through with virtual domains do I have to switch to another MDA?
Yes, you can see the problem with virtual accounts. If joe@foo is a different account from joe@bar, and you are relying on /etc/password for authentication, where is the home directory? The fact that you need to have separate mailboxes for the same user is what’s causing the increase in complexity. It doesn’t matter if you have 5 users or 500, having virtual domains suddenly raises these questions.
One somewhat less elegant way to escape this is to run two mail servers, so you get two sets of accounts and separate /homes. Perhaps inside virtual machines?
Ok, things are getting unnecessarily complicated. Is it possible to take different route? Let’s say I have two Unix accounts for each user, nick_1 and nick_2, and then redirect mail from full.name@example_1.new to nick_1 (and similarly for nick_2). The only issue I see here is that nicks can receive mails directly as well (not a showstopper, but it would be nice to solve this). How could I prevent four addresses nick_1(& 2)@example_1(& 2).new from receiving mail?
This I believe you can do with a virtual_alias_maps so that the mailbox has to be listed there to be a recipient. See Postfix Configuration Parameters under smtpd_reject_unlisted_recipient