Postfix offers delivery for four different classes of recipient addresses: local, relay, virtual alias, and virtual mailbox. How you configure the domains you accept mail for determines the delivery method used by Postfix. The following are the delivery transports used by Postfix:
Delivers mail on the local system. Each address has an account on the
system or comes from the local aliases file (historically
/etc/aliases). Delivered
messages go to the system’s mail spool or mail files in individual
home directories. Deliveries are handled by the local delivery
agent or passed to a custom delivery program. Lists local domains
in the mydestination
parameter.
Delivers mail to other systems, usually on the same
network. Relay domains are generally configured on gateway systems
when Postfix accepts mail for an entire network. The gateway
system relays messages to the correct internal mail system.
Deliveries are handled by the relay transport, which is simply a
clone of the smtp agent, but it
is optimized for making deliveries to internal systems on a local
network. Lists relay domains in the relay_domains parameter. Mail relaying
is discussed in Chapter
9.
Delivers mail for virtual mailbox domains. Virtual mailbox domains are
used for hosting multiple domains using a separate mail spool that
contains mailboxes for many separate domains. Email users
typically do not have system accounts on the mail server. Lists
virtual mailbox domains in the virtual_mailbox_domains parameter.
Virtual hosting is discussed in Chapter 8.
Deliveries to nonlocal domains are handled by the smtp transport. It determines where to deliver messages for any nonlocal domain through DNS lookups. Virtual alias addresses are resubmitted to Postfix for delivery to the new address, at which point they’ll be handled by one of the above transports.
The rest of the chapter discusses the details of local delivery.