I'm not a postfix expert so my examples are with qmail but the the principles are the same. * Michael.James@csiro.au (Michael.James@csiro.au) [030618 23:06]:

How do I ask the web of postfix processes what will happen to a given email?

Send a mail and watch the logs of course :) This comes up with qmail as well. By design, the various components of of the system only know the absolute minimum about other components. E.g., in qmail all the smtpd knows is how to speak smtp, what domains it should accept in the RCPT TO command, and how to hand a mail off to the qmail-queue process (the postfix smtpd can also know whether the local part of the RCPT TO is valid). It can't expand aliases, decide who's local and who's remote, etc. qmail-queue only knows how to stick the message into the queue so that can qmail-send come along and decide whether the message is local or remote and so on. You get the idea. Anyway, 'sendmail -bt' works because sendmail is just one giant program that does everything and has access to all of the information necessary to tell you exactly the path a mail will travel. It's a good thing that postfix and qmail can't do this even if it is a loss of functionality. -- -ckm