Rewrite Rules

Mail is routed to a channel based on the result of running the destination addresses through domain rewriting rules, or rewrite rules for short. Rewrite rules are used to convert addresses into true domain addresses and to determine their corresponding channels. These rules are used to rewrite addresses appearing in both the transport layer and the message header. The transport layer is the message’s envelope. It contains routing information and is invisible to the user, but is the actual information used to deliver the message to the appropriate recipient.

The rewrite rules and the table of channels cooperate to determine the disposition of each address. The result of the rewrite process is a rewritten address and a routing system, that is, the system (channel) to which the message is to be sent/queued. Depending upon the topology of the network, the routing system might only be the first step along the path the message takes to reach its destination, or it might be the final destination system itself.

After the rewrite process has finished, a search is made for the routing system among the channel portion of the imta.cnf file. Each channel has one or more host names associated with it. The routing system name is compared against each of these names to determine to which channel to enqueue the message. A simple rewrite rule is shown here:

example.com     $U%example.com@tcp_siroe-daemon

This rule matches addresses for the domain example.com only. Such matching addresses would be rewritten using the template $U%$D, where:

$U

Indicates the user portion or left-hand side of the address (before the @)

%

Indicates the @ sign

$D

Indicates the domain portion or right-hand side of the address (after the @)

Thus, a message of the form wallaby@thor.example.com would be rewritten to wallaby@example.com, and would be sent to the channel whose channel host name is tcp_siroe-daemon.

Rewrite rules can perform sophisticated substitutions based on mapping tables, LDAP directory lookups, and database references. While occasionally cryptic, they are useful in the fact that they operate at a low level and impose little direct overhead on the message processing cycle. For full information on these and other features available in the rewrite process, see Chapter 11, Configuring Rewrite Rules, in Sun Java System Messaging Server 6.3 Administration Guide.