> On May 10, 2017, at 12:48 AM, Doug Hardie <bc...@lafn.org> wrote:
>
> In the meantime I was entering some of the addresses and forwarding addresses
> into the vmail alias file. Each entry was preceded by "# ". My understanding
> was that lines starting with a # would be ignored. I did not bother to run
> postmap as it would do nothing useful.
Adding comments to a table has no effect, other than warnings in the log file
that the source file is newer than the table.
> Several hours later I noticed that no outgoing mail was going out. Everything
> was receiving an error in maillog:
>
> May 8 00:02:49 mail postfix/error[83540]: 8A72B114C3EE: to=<wa6...@arrl.net>,
> relay=none, delay=94792, delays=94792/0.03/0/0, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred
> (mail transport unavailable)
There were earlier failures in the log for mail to this domain, with a delivery
agent other than "postfix/error". The error messages for those failures are the
reason why mail to the destination is not being delivered.
> Note, this address was not in the vmail alias file. It appears to have
> affected
> all outgoing mail. Incoming mail was processed normally.
Coincidence is not causality, something else broke.
> In addition there were a number of these messages (starting hours later in
> the day):
>
> May 8 23:44:57 mail postfix/smtpd[95331]: warning: database
> /usr/local/etc/postfix/vmail_alias.db is older than source file
> /usr/local/etc/postfix/vmail_alias
This warning is harmless.
> To restore service, I removed all these entries, ran post map and did postfix
> restart. Problem continued until I terminated postfix and restarted it.
> Then outgoing mail resumed delivery properly.
The "restart" cleared the list of throttled transports, but the problem is
likely to return. I still get annoyed when folks seem too lazy to look more
closely at their logs. :-(
--
Viktor.
