PLESK PostFix Error Local Loop in maillog, how to troubleshoot

Question

I'm using the PHP mail() function, using PostFix, on CentOS6, Plesk 10.4, and my email is not getting delivered to a particular address. My personal GMail and Yahoo email addresses receive email from my server fine and do not produce errors. After a wonderful suggestion on here, I checked my mail logs, and this is the error I see :

Apr 10 10:26:29 ######### postfix/qmgr[8323]: 19EA21827: from=
<[email protected]>, size=645, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Apr 10 10:26:29 ######### postfix-local[8331]: postfix-local: 
[email protected], [email protected],
dirname=/var/qmail/mailnames
Apr 10 10:26:29 ######### postfix-local[8331]: 
cannot chdir to mailname dir name: No such file or directory
Apr 10 10:26:29 ######### postfix-local[8331]: 
Unknown user: [email protected]
Apr 10 10:26:29 ######### postfix/pipe[8330]: 19EA21827:
to=<[email protected]>, relay=plesk_virtual, delay=0.15, delays=0.11/0/0/0.04,
dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (delivered via plesk_virtual service)
Apr 10 10:26:29 ######### postfix/qmgr[8323]: 19EA21827: removed

[email protected] is the name I've declared in php.ini for

sendmail_from = "[email protected]" sendmail_path = "/usr/sbin/sendmail -t -f [email protected]"

and the recipient is supposed to be [email protected].

Is this an error on my side or the recipients? Can I address this on my server?

Many thanks SF.

Solution

I've discovered this is an error due to PLESK (and the user), and because there isn't much documentation on it, I think this post is worth keeping.

Because I had the vhost domain of the email address I was sending to established in PLESK, it tried to revert to a local Postfix search when it recognized the tail end of the email address as something it thought was hosted on the server itself.

There is documentation on how to fix this in the PostFix configuration file here.

I appreciate everyone's efforts.

Comments

[becomingwisest]

Check the contents of mail logs in /var/log/

[RCNeil]

hm.... /var/log/mail/ is empty, and /var/log/maillog and all files like it are blank. I've sent emails with this server.... is that normal?

[RCNeil]

looks like CentOS doesn't use /var/log/maillog, they use /usr/local/psa/var/log/maillog instead...

[adamo]

I do not speak Postfix but it seems that your web server thinks it should deliver the mail locally. Does your problem exist with any recipient, or only with your domains? Is it the case that your email is hosted elsewhere (e.g. Google) than your web server in question?

[RCNeil]

The problem only exists for the recipient's address - [email protected]. GMail, Yahoo, MSN, all receive emails from my server with the mail() function fine and do not produce the same errors in my mail logs. I never set up a SMTP outside the server, so I would imagine it's still on my server. Hope I answered that correctly.

[adamo]

First of all do not be afraid to reveal what company.com and myserver.com are. It will help debugging. Second it seems that you are running both qmail and Postfix. Make sure you are not.

[RCNeil]

I don't think anything. Would it provide better insight if I found and posted the PostFix logs? Should I change the title of my post to better suit my problem?

[adaptr]

What I mean is that I suspect that those are not written by postfix - hence postfix is only part of the mail delivery chain and may or may not be part of the problem.

[RCNeil]

Yea, even stranger is what @adamo suggested, that it starts with Postfix, reverts to local for some reason, then the final output (which I added to my post later) is Postfix, no? It even returns a 'status=sent' which can't be right either, although from what I've read this is a PLESK 10.3+ bug.

[adaptr]

You should have included the real postfix logs right away; I could have told you that the postfix-local lines were irrelevant, and wrong. as you can see from the pipe(8) delivery, postfix handed the message off to plesk.

[RCNeil]

Sorry. I'm learning this as I go.