[rt-users] RT4 Postfix/Apache Email Return-Path causing issues

[Billington, James]

I am relaying RT mail through our corporate Exchange Server. I have each of the 10 queue's correspond/comment address set to a valid external address, and have made contacts in Exchange to relay the mail properly. That doesn't change the Return-Path that Postfix sets. Whether I setup contacts on the Exchange Server or not the Return-Path still isn't from a valid domain.

I'd seen this in their documentation before I'd ever started this mail chain...



The sendmail documentation says the following... http://www.sendmail.org/~ca/email/man/sendmail.html
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-fname      Sets the name of the ``from'' person (i.e., the sender of the
                 mail).  -f can only be used by ``trusted'' users (normally
                 root, daemon, and network) or if the person you are trying to
                 become is the same as the person you are.
********************************************

This looks like it would change the "From:" header and I wouldn't want to do that. As I mentioned before RT  has already set this properly and I don't want to mess with it.



The RT documentation says the following... http://bestpractical.com/rt/docs/latest/RT_Config.html#Outgoing-mail
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$SetOutgoingMailFrom

    $SetOutgoingMailFrom tells RT to set the sender envelope to the Correspond mail address of the ticket's queue.

    Warning: If you use this setting, bounced mails will appear to be incoming mail to the system, thus creating new tickets.
$OverrideOutgoingMailFrom

    $OverrideOutgoingMailFrom is used for overwriting the Correspond address of the queue as it is handed to sendmail -f. This helps force the From_ header away from www-data or other email addresses that show up in the "Sent by" line in Outlook.

    The option is a hash reference of queue name to email address. If there is no ticket involved, then the value of the Default key will be used.

    This option is irrelevant unless $SetOutgoingMailFrom is set.

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However I assumed that this would change the "From:" and/or "ReplyTo:" headers. It mentions the "from" header, and sendmail -f specifically so I took what I thought I knew of that documentation and applied it here.

If I understand you all correctly it appears that if I use the sendmail -f argument it will only change the "Return-Path" header. If that's true then the documentation is confusing. Maybe a note should be added to the documentation clarifying this. Perhaps more detail about the "sendmail -f" argument and the "$SetOutgoingMailFrom" option.

I don't like the idea of changing the postfix hostname since it is technically correct and works as designed for internal email. Though that could be what I end up doing if "sendmail -f" doesn't only change the Return-Path. If "sendmail -f" DOES only change the Return-Path then I'll probably go with the "$SetOutgoingMailFrom" option. I don't think the warning would be true in my case since the bounces are from "AutoReply" and "Resolved" emails and have the proper [RTName ticket number] in the subject so they should just be added to the tickets. This could be annoying if the ticket is already closed and bounce message reopens (or keeps reopening) the ticket, but I suppose having the bounce message in the ticket history would be the best for ticket tracking.

If I could just get a final word of clarification on my "sendmail -f" concern I would appreciate it, and I really do appreciate all the help from everybody thus far.

Thanks,

James Billington
Senior Systems Administrator
ManTech

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