How do I get a Plesk 11 server to accept email to addresses with delimiter (VERP)?

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What I Want

We send out bulk renewal notices via email and it would be ideal if we could link any bounce messages with the corresponding record in our database. I recently learned about VERP (wiki) and thought that would be the perfect solution for us.

What I Tried

I did a test before making any changes and the message is bounced back to sender, as expected. Then I uncommented this line in /etc/postfix/main.cf and restarted Postfix.

recipient_delimiter = +

The Problem

Unfortunately, I can't seem to get it to work. Messages sent to addresses that include the delimiter are no longer rejected, but they don't appear to be delivered anywhere either. Here's an excerpt from the maillog:

Jul  8 12:14:36 cl-t082-392cl postfix/smtpd[28723]: 6E98A1A404CC: client=mta02.eastlink.ca[24.224.136.13]
Jul  8 12:14:36 cl-t082-392cl postfix/cleanup[28727]: 6E98A1A404CC: message-id=<[email protected]>
Jul  8 12:14:36 cl-t082-392cl postfix/qmgr[28717]: 6E98A1A404CC: from=<[email protected]>, size=1343, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Jul  8 12:14:36 cl-t082-392cl postfix/pipe[28752]: 6E98A1A404CC: to=<[email protected]>, relay=plesk_virtual, delay=0.22, delays=0.15/0/0/0.07, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (delivered via plesk_virtual service)
Jul  8 12:14:36 cl-t082-392cl postfix/qmgr[28717]: 6E98A1A404CC: removed

So it appears that Postifx is doing its job, but that the plesk_virtual service is dropping the ball. No message is returned to sender. No message shows up in bounces/Maildir/cur. If plesk_virtual is writing an error somewhere, I don't know where (I checked /var/log/messages).

My Search Efforts

I searched Google, here, and the Parallels forums. I got several hits in Google for the same problem I am having, but they are all for the same message which is dated almost 3 years ago. And there was no solution given. I posted to the Parallels forums several days ago. I've gotten a few views, but zero responses.

What I Don't Want

I've seen similar problems where the suggestion was to forward all undelivered mail to a particular address. That's a catch-all. And that is not a realistic solution in today's world of spam.

Question

How do I get Plesk to correctly recognize and deliver messages to addresses with the delimiter? I can't imagine that I am the only one who wants to do this on a Plesk server.

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There are 1 answers

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eyeonall On

I answered this on the Plesk forums. For anyone still interested there is a postfix workaround. Added the following to the main.cf:

recipient_canonical_classes = envelope_recipient
recipient_canonical_maps = regexp:/etc/postfix/recipient_canonical_map

Created a file /etc/postfix/recipient_canonical_map with this regex:

/^(.+)\+.+@(.*)/ ${1}@${2}

Granted, it assumes + is the only VERP delimiter but it works. The only caveat is that it does not bounce bad addresses, which may not be a bad thing..