Need to treat some email-ids of the same domain as external/remote users.

It's generally not possible to properly distribute mail based on mail header entries.
Sometimes the recipient's address won't be in mail headers.

It may be multi-drop at the other end, but you should want it to be multiple mailboxes at your end.

Unless your upstream mail server is scripted to specifically add a special message header based on the actual recipient address list that was submitted with MAIL FROM  (which could be intended for MULTIPLE local recipients, e.g. the message could be intended for two of the users of the domain),  this may not be a tractible problem.


This is especially true of Bcc'd mail, commonly utilized for mailing list traffic.

FETCHMAIL has a multidrop mode that may help you "pull" mail like this, from the fetchmail man page  (install fetchmail and type 'man fetchmail'):

*With multidrop-mode, fetchmail is not able to assume that there is only
 a  single  recipient,  but rather that the mail server account actually
 contains mail intended for any number of different recipients.

*Therefore,  fetchmail must attempt to deduce the proper "envelope recipient"
 from the mail headers of each message.   In  this  mode  of  operation,
 fetchmail almost resembles an MTA, however it is important to note that

* neither the POP nor IMAP protocols were intended for use in this  fashion,  and  hence  envelope information is often not directly available. Instead, fetchmail must resort to a process of informed  guess-work  in an attempt to discover the true envelope recipient of a message, unless the ISP stores the envelope information in some header  (not  all  do).

* Even  if this information is present in the headers, the process can be error-prone and is dependent upon the specific  mail  server  used  for mail  retrieval.

* Multidrop-mode is used when more than one local user is specified for a particular server account in the configuration file.  Note  that  the  forgoing discussion of singledrop- and multidrop-modes does not apply to the ESMTP ETRN or ODMR retrieval methods, since  they are  based upon the SMTP protocol which specifically provides the envelope recipient to fetchmail.

I am sorry, I think I did not add enough information in the question.

The remote users city1@abc.com, city2@abc.com are not a part of the catch-all account. So the catch-all account does not download emails for the users city1@abc.com, city2@abc.com.

The challenge is that when local1@abc.com sends an email to 2 users local2@abc.com and city1@abc.com then the email server should deliver the email to local2@abc.com locally and city1@abc.com should be treated as a REMOTE user.

thanks
agnes

You need to configure the email server that retrieves the catch-all email to use the Delivered-To: line versus reprocessing the emails based on the To: or Cc: fields.

Without know which server you have that pulls the catch-all it is impossible to say whether this is even an option.

virtualdomains  is primarily for scenarios like mapping an entire domain to be beneath a user on the system.  /var/qmail/users/assign   is what you could edit/look at to override handling manually per domain or user;  as a user of vpopmail, I don't recommend you actually edit and add a user entry this file,  because this file is normally auto-generated,  and re-generated every time you change a mailbox and vpopmail has special needs (also, the program  /var/qmail/bin/qmail-newu   needs to get  run every time the assign file changes).

Take a look at the contents of the file, it will normally contain something like:
+example.com-:example.com:399:399:/usr/local/var/vpopmail/domains/example.com:-::

The vpopmail path is very important, it indicates where you can make .qmail files for the domain.

What I believe you want to do is  (in this example)  edit  /usr/local/var/vpopmail/domains/example.com/.qmail-city1
and Place in the file, something like this:
|qmail-remote '[put.theremote.mailserver.ip.here]' "$SENDER" "$EXT@$HOST"

e.g.
|qmail-remote '[10.180.0.56]' "$SENDER" "$EXT@$HOST"

Of course, the IP address needs to be the specific remote mailserver to carry the message to.     Be very careful about this,  qmail will not generally protect you against creating a mail loop  when forcing the system to use a remote mailserver for a local user,  /var/qmail/control/smtproutes  has the same risks.

#######

Or If you placed an entry ahead of that in the assign file, you could override the handling for that user.   The problem is this file is generally automatically generated.

To manipulate the assign file (when NOT using vpopmail), I with my hacked POP3 proxy+manually hacked popper for vdomain support normally do things like this, edit /var/qmail/users/append and..
#Temporary stop mail flow
chmod +t /var/qmail/control
cat /var/qmail/users/mailinglists > /var/qmail/users/assign
/var/qmail/bin/qmail-pw2u < /etc/passwd >> /var/qmail/users/assign
/var/qmail/bin/qmail-newu
#Turn mail back on
chmod -t /var/qmail/control

Because you use vpopmail, you will very possibly need to utilize tools that came with vpopmail instead of qmail to handle any changes you want to make to the 'users' file.

When vpopmail is used for virtualdomain support
Normally one would find the directory for the domain in

/var/vpopmail/domains/domainname.com
and create  mailboxes for the city1 and city2 users
or a  set of files
.qmail-city1
.qmail-city2

with the forwarding address

Or make a mailbox

vadduser username@domain.com

One of the wonders of the Internet is that it doesn't matter where the server is -- my "backup" mail server is in Vancouver, even though my main mail server is in Tampa, FL.

That being said, I'm somewhat confused by your question -- but what I THINK you're asking is whether different users in the same domain can fetch their mail from different servers.

If that is your question, then the answer is yes -- but with a caveat.

Before I go much further, I would ask that you confirm that you're trying to accomplish this...  and if you ARE in fact trying to accomplish this, I might ask why? As in, why not just access all of ABC.COM's e-mails from one server (I host nearly a hundred domains from my server in Tampa -- and except for webmail, ALL of them access their mail via SMTPS and IMAPS connections (that is SMTP and IMAP over SSL). Some of those clients are in the Tampa Bay area, some are not (some are in NC, some in SC, one in GA, one in AZ, and one is even in China!)

So before I write a long set of instructions on how to setup qmail to forward messages for individual users to another server that will accept the messages for just those users, please confirm that this is what you're hoping to accomplish.

Thanks,

Dan
IT4SOHO