mail_satellite

Overview

Installs and configures a mail server so that it’s possible to send emails either through port 25 or by executing the sendmail command. All email is sent using a smarthost.

It’s mainly useful in two cases:

1. Forwarding cron email (otherwise the administrator would need to login to see if any cron email has been received locally.)

2. Being used as the smarthost of applications or services installed on the server. In this case such applications should be configured to use localhost:25 as the smarthost. While they could be configured to use the smarthost directly, using localhost:25 can be useful especially when the smarthost is not in our control, because whenever something doesn’t work we can get some information from Postfix’s logs as to what is going wrong.

Parameters

mailname

The default domain name that will be used for email addresses that do not contain @.

smarthost

The smart host, such as relay.example.com.

smarthostport

The smarthost port, such as 25 or 587 (the default). If the outgoing port is 465 or 587, encrypted connections are forced.

smarthostusername, smarthostpassword

The username and password to connect to the smart host. If unspecified it will be connecting unauthenticated.

masquerade_domains

Optional. This will be used as Postfix’s masquerade_domains parameter. For example, if mailname is nextcloud.digigov.grnet.gr, you may want to use masquerade_domains = grnet.gr so that the sender root@nextcloud.digigov.grnet.gr will be converted to grnet.gr.

mail_aliases

A hash that maps local emails to actual addresses, for example:

mail_aliases:
  root: antonis@example.com,panagiotis@example.com
  www-data: root

You should practically always create an alias for root, and very often for www-data as well, and for everything that uses cron.

Note: We don’t use /etc/aliases for this functionality; Postfix only uses /etc/aliases for local delivery. We use virtual_alias_maps instead.

inet_interfaces

If loopback-only (the default), it listens only on the local interface. Change it to all (or any value accepted by the postfix inet_interfaces parameter) so that it listens on all interfaces. In that case, you need to care about the firewall yourself. For example, assuming you use the common firewall:

- name: Allow smtp through firewall
  lineinfile:
    path: /etc/ferm/ansible-late
    line: "proto tcp dport smtp saddr (1.2.3.4 5.6.7.8) ACCEPT;"
  notify: Reload ferm

You also need to set my_networks.

mynetworks

The networks that are allowed to relay. If unset, only the localhost from the local interface is allowed to send emails. If you set it, don’t specify the localhost, this will be included anyway.

See also inet_interfaces.