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How to rewrite headers in outgoing mail messages

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Mikhail Shport
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Plesk for Linux kb: how-to ABT: Group B

Applicable to:

  • Plesk for Linux

Question

How to rewrite headers of outgoing mail messages?
For example, change From: MAILER-DAEMON@server.example.com to From: "Mailer-Daemon at server.example.com" <MAILER-DAEMON@server.example.com>.

Answer

This feature is not yet implemented in Plesk UI, but a feature request can be created on the Plesk UserVoice.

Workaround

As a workaround, use Postfix header_checks:

  1. Connect to the server via SSH

  2. Add a header_checks entry to the /etc/postfix/main.cf configuration file (the file specified will contain regular expressions for the rewriting):

    # postconf -e "header_checks = pcre:/etc/postfix/header_checks"

  3. If the file /etc/postfix/header_checks does not exist, create it:

    # [ ! -f /etc/postfix/header_checks ] && >/etc/postfix/header_checks

  4. Modify the /etc/postfix/header_checks file:

    • For example, to rewrite all headers with From: MAILER-DAEMON@server.example.com to From: "Mailer-Daemon at server.example.com" <MAILER-DAEMON@server.example.com> , add the following line to the end of the file:

      CONFIG_TEXT: /^From:\s+MAILER-DAEMON@server.example.com/ REPLACE From: "Mailer-Daemon at server.example.com" MAILER-DAEMON@server.example.com

    • To hide server IP address from headers:

      CONFIG_TEXT: /^Received:\s+.*/ IGNORE

      Note: For more information on regular expressions, refer to the PCRE documentation by php.net .

    • To change Message-ID:

      CONFIG_TEXT: /Message-Id:\s+<(.*?)@server.example.com>/ REPLACE Message-Id: $1@example.com

  5. Reload Postfix to apply the enabled header_checks:

    # service postfix reload

If a regular expression was applied to the mail message, a similar line will be appended to the /var/log/maillog log file:

CONFIG_TEXT: server postfix/cleanup[21124]: E5CD0225EF9: replace: header From: MAILER-DAEMON@server.example.com (Mail Delivery System) from local; from=<> to= user@example.com: From: "Mailer-Daemon at server.example.com" MAILER-DAEMON@server.example.com

Note: For more information on header_checks feature in Postfix, refer to the Postfix documentation .

Comments

7 comments

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  • Avatar
    Miomir Besarabic

    Hi,

    Is it possible to prevent outgoing mails marked as Spam with header_check? A lot of customers forward mails to extern mail addresses and make us a problem.

    Regards,

    Miomir

     

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    Dinara Tsydenova

    Hello @Miomir Besarabic,
    As I can see the case has been already discussed in the following article https://support.plesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000786914 
    Here is your reply:
    -----------
    The best solution was Spamassassin pre-queue filtering, which cover everything and allow to reject Spam or unwanted mails. Pre-queue filtering is simple to implement with Postfix and header_checks (on Linux). I did on our test server with just few changes in 2 files.
    -----------

    Glad to hear the solution is found.

    If you have any additional questions, let us know.

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    Andrii Balytskyi

    pcre does not work for me. I use regexp.

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  • Avatar
    Clemens Mol

    Adding the "/^Received:s+.*/ IGNORE" makes Plesk add a second Date header. This behaviour started at Obsidian, had this rule work for Plesk Onyx a few weeks ago. Any suggestions on how to fix this?

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  • Avatar
    Andrii Balytskyi

    Do not use IGNORE. Use REPLACE and this issue  will be fixed.

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  • Avatar
    Francisco Roman Garcia Rodriguez

    Hi Clemens Mol,

    I've just tested it on our test environment and it hasn't added a second date header as you can see below:

    [root@our cur]# cat 1586266053.M953238P25613.our.example.com\,S\=1408\,W\=1446\:2\,S
    Authentication-Results: our.example.com;
    dmarc=pass (p=NONE sp=NONE) smtp.from=example.com header.from=example.com;
    dkim=pass header.d=example.com
    Return-Path: <webspuser@example.com>
    X-Original-To: padmin@example.com
    Delivered-To: padmin@example.com
    Received: by our.example.com (Postfix, from userid 10000)
    id 7104A2A318; Tue, 7 Apr 2020 15:27:33 +0200 (CEST)
    DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=example.com;
    s=default; t=1586266053;
    bh=*******************=; h=To:Subject:From;
    b=*******************=
    To: padmin@example.com
    Subject: New WordPress Site
    Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2020 13:27:33 +0000
    From: WordPress <wordpress@example.com>
    Message-ID: <cMID@example.com>
    X-Mailer: PHPMailer 5.2.27 (https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer)
    MIME-Version: 1.0
    Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

    Are you sure your Postfix configuration is by default and has no customizations?

    In any case, in order to investigate, it would be better if you open a new support request.

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    usr

    For me, contrary to what is stated in the article, Postfix also applies the configuration to incoming mail and not only to outgoing mail. If only outgoing mails should be taken into account, the parameters should not be entered in main.cf, but in master.cf. Which concrete parameters would have to be entered for this, so that Plesk can also work with it?

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