From: Wietse Venema (wietseporcupine.org)
Date: Mon May 03 2004 - 11:51:54 CDT

• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]

David N. Welton:
[ Charset ISO-8859-1 unsupported, converting... ]
> Hi,
>
> As per the subject, I was reading through the site, and found that I
> really would like a simple, Mr. Rogers-esque guide to a day in the
> life of an email going through Postfix.
>
> http://www.postfix.org/OVERVIEW.html
>
> is mostly there, but it might be nice to combine it with something
> that illustrates the steps and processing an email goes through.
> Something along the lines of:
>
> Bob (bobbob.com) sends an email to his friend Fred, (fredfred.com).
> The email arrives on Fred's Postfix email server, which then does
>
> X, Y, then Z, mentioning which files and transformations it goes
> through.
>
> Another one for Fred sending an email to webmaster (webmaster) on his
> own machine, and Fred using 'mail' to send an email to Bob from his
> own machine would also be nice.
>
> All this would be in aid of better explaining simply and directly the
> steps that email goes through and what handles processing at each
> step. I know enough about Postfix to get things done, but sometimes
> it's nice to have an idea of exactly what is happening where...why
> etc/aliases is different from the virtual alias map and so on, and at
> what point each of these files 'acts on' the email.

You're welcome to draft such a document. You will find that the
result will be the combined size of OVERVIEW, ADDRESS_REWRITING
and local(8).

        Wietse

> I'm a bit sleepy this morning, so hopefully this comes across with
> some degree of coherence and comprehensibility:-)
>
> Thankyou for your time,
> David N. Welton
>
>

• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]