Unauthenticated Relaying

By default, mailcow's postfix considers all networks untrusted except its own IPV4_NETWORK and IPV6_NETWORK ranges, which are specified in mailcow.conf. Although this is reasonable in most cases, there may be circumstances where you want to add a host or subnet as an unauthenticated relayer.

By default, mailcow uses mynetworks_style = subnet to specify internal subnets and leaves mynetworks unconfigured.

If you decide to set mynetworks independently in Postfix's extra.conf, Postfix will ignore the mynetworks_style setting. This means that you will have to add the IPv4 and IPv6 addresses used internally by mailcow (specified in mailcow.conf as IPV4_NETWORK and IPV6_NETWORK respectively), as well as the loopback subnets manually!

Explanation

The setting mynetworks allows registered hosts or subnets to send e-mails to the Postfix MTA WITHOUT authentication. This is especially useful if monitoring e-mails are to be sent from Linux servers in the same network without extra authentication.

Danger

A wrong setting of mynetworks allows your server to be used as an open relay. If this is abused, it will impair your ability to send email and it may take some time for this to subside.

Example

As an example, let's take the subnet 192.168.2.0/24, which we want to relay unauthenticated.

Edit data/conf/postfix/extra.cf:

mynetworks = 127.0.0.0/8 [::ffff:127.0.0.0]/104 [::1]/128 [fe80::]/10 172.22.1.0/24 [fd4d:6169:6c63:6f77::]/64 192.168.2.0/24

Warning

The subnets before our attached example subnet MUST exists before or after your entered values. Otherwise some mailcow components such as Watchdog or some Sieve Filters (such as Absence Agents) will not work and errors will occur during operation.

Run the following command to apply your new settings:

docker compose restart postfix-mailcow

docker-compose restart postfix-mailcow

Good to know!

IPv6 addresses MUST be entered with [] (square brackets) as mynetworks parameters in this case. Otherwise they cannot be processed.

Info

More information about mynetworks can be found in the Postfix documentation.