Catchall Router on Exim does not work

Question

I have setup a catchall router on exim (used as last router):

catchall:
  driver = redirect
  domains = +local_domains
  data = ${lookup{*@$domain}lsearch{/etc/aliases}}
  retry_use_local_part

This works perfectly when sending emails locally. However, if I login to my GMail account and send an email to [email protected], then I get an "Unrouteable Address".

Thank you for any hints to solve this issue.

Answer 1

For this router to work, make sure that

1. mydomain.com is in local_domains
2. there is an entry for *@mydomain.com in /etc/aliases
3. MX record for mydomain.com is pointing to the server, where you've configured this

Answer 2

This is old as heck, but I didn't see a good answer posted and someone else might want to know the answer.

This post is geared towards Debian with in single configuration file mode. It should work on any Linux Exim4 install though. For the purpose of explaining things we’ll use [email protected] which is configured with the hostname mail.example.com. The system will have a real user called test and we want to create an alias for test called alias. So the end result will all email sent to [email protected] forwarded to [email protected] without having to create the user alias on the system.

First we need to create a place to store all of the alias files:

mkdir /etc/exim/aliases.d

vim /etc/exim/aliases.d/mail.example.com

contents of the alias file for mail.example.com alias:test

vim /etc/exim/exim4.conf.template

Now look for the section system_aliases. Here you’ll see data = ${lookup{$local_part}lsearch{/etc/aliases}} or something similar. Change that to

data = ${lookup{$local_part}lsearch{/etc/exim4/aliases.d/$domain}}

Save the file and restart exim. The alias should now work. To add support for other domains just add more alias files in the aliases.d directory with the correct hostname.

I copied and pasted this from my blog:

0xeb.info

Answer 3

In the system_aliases: section of the config file you already have a section which does the lookup in /etc/aliases.

Replace

data = ${lookup{$local_part}lsearch{/etc/aliases}}

with

data = ${lookup{$local_part}lsearch*@{/etc/aliases}}

and make sure you have *:catchall_username* in /etc/aliases

This works great for a single domain mail server which is already using /etc/aliases