Forwarding a Postfix Virtual Alias to /dev/null

It's poor practice to send out email from email addresses that don't resolve, and may mean your mail ends up in a spamtrap. But sometimes you want to use a "do-not-reply" type of email address, and you don't want to have to mass-delete the mailbox at intervals.

The usual solution is to forward to /dev/null, and in a local-only setup you could do that in /etc/aliases:

do-not-reply: /dev/null

juliet@example.com        juliet@example2.com

devnull:	/dev/null

do-not-reply@example.com	devnull

postmap -q do-not-reply@example.com /etc/postfix/virtual/dbfile

One last gotcha: On some systems, the /etc/aliases change may not work unless that user (devnull) already exists on the system. You may well already have a nobody user in /etc/passwd (one with a nonexistent home directory and no login shell), which you can use in place of devnull in /etc/aliases; otherwise you can set up a devnull user to operate similarly.

Juliet Kemp has been messing around with Linux systems, for financial reward and otherwise, for about a decade. She is also the author of "Linux System Administration Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach" (Apress, 2009).

Follow ServerWatch on Twitter