Postfix and Cyrus data format error. Command output: root: Mailbox does not exist
daniel posted this on Jun 30th 2008 under FreeBSD
I saw tons of these messages in my mailog:
Jun 30 12:53:42 mx02 postfix/pipe[14167]: 09275108B2B: to=
This mailserver handles about 150k e-mails a day. We use postfix/cyrus/MailScanner/MySQL.
Users can set their own spamsettings. For example a user can forward his/her spam to a different e-mail address. I set the spam.actions for MailScanner to:
forward bla@foo.bar header "X-Spam-Status: yes"
This is what did not work and gave the errors. Postfix complains about the fact that cyrus does not know this e-mail address, and this is correct.
After some research i found out that this was very odd 
E-mail sent to an e-mail address which is not classified as spam works fine, but when e-mail is classified as spam, postfix requeues it and this is not working as expected. Somehow postfix does not rewrite the e-mail address to a local (cyrus) address before it passes it on to cyrus deliver.
Well, my fix was not that hard after all. Just use the cyrus mailbox for forwarding spam to from MailScanner.
For example if your cyrus mailbox name is "joe" just forward the spam to joe@your.fully_qualified_server.name
When someone has a clue about how to fix this without a workaround, please let met know.