Is the use of proxmox-mail-forward to handle mail on PVE?

[phep]

Hi,

By default /root/.foward is piping mail in /usr/bin/proxmox-mail-forward.

I failed to find any documentation for this program and while I found the source code this does not tell me if using this script is a requirement.

I'm new to Proxmox. Is there any compulsory reason to let this pipe-command in the .forward or may I feel free to configure the mail stack as I usually do on our Debian servers?

At least am I free to add some other destinations in the .forward file?

TIA,

phep

 

[Lukas Wagner]

For the sake of completeness I will briefly describe what the proxmox-mail-forward binary does: It looks up the mail address of the root@pam user (from /etc/pve/user.cfg, or /etc/proxmox-backup-server/user.cfg) and forwards the mail that it receives from Postfix via stdin to this address. This is done so that email notifications from various system daemons and PVE components which send their mail to the local 'root' user are forwarded to the email address for root@pam (this is the mail address that is entered during the installation of PVE).

If you edit .forward that will not happen any more. Apart from that there should be no side effects.

Soonish the proxmox-mail-forward binary will feed these mails into the new notification system (which offers multiple notification target endpoints, filtering, etc.), but this is not merged yet.

 

[phep]

OK. Thank you Lukas for this explanation. Looking at the source I had figured out what the script does but I was really not sure about the possible side effects.

Yet I think I'll keep the pipe in the .forward, I'll just add some local fluffiness.