Sequestering E-Mail

When testing applications one of the concerns is always that their actions don't effect the real-world. One aspect of that this is sending e-mail; the last thing you want is the application you are testing to send a paid-in-full customer a flurry of e-mails that he owes you a zillion dollars. A simple, and reliable, method to avoid this is to adjust the Postfix server on the host used for testing to bury all mail in a shared folder. This way:

• You don't need to make any changes to the application between production and testing.
• You can see the message content exactly as it would ordinarily have been delivered.

To accomplish this you can use Postfix's generic address rewriting feature; generic address rewriting processes addresses of messages sent [vs. received as is the more typical case for address rewriting] by the service. For this example we'll rewrite every address to shared+myfolder@example.com using a regular expression.

Step#1

Create the regular expression map. Maps are how Postfix handles all rewriting; a match for the input address is looked for in the left hand [key] column and rewritten in the form specified by the right hand [value] column.

echo "/(.)/           shared+myfolder@example.com" > /etc/postfix/generic.regexp

Step#2

Configure Postfix to use the new map for generic address rewriting.

postconf -e smtp_generic_maps=regexp:/etc/postfix/generic.regexp

Step#3

Tell Postfix to reload its configuration.

postfix reload

Now any mail, to any address, sent via the hosts' Postfix service, will be driven not to the original address but to the shared "myfolder" folder.