Postfix/Documentation_for_owner-*_companion_aliases

From http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/postfix/2009-06/0588.html

You're probably familiar with the idea of list expansion in /etc/aliases. Having an alias for owner-listname changes things a little.

The question spawned from here: Postfix/Message_with_300,000+_recips_via_alias_maps

Matthias Andree:
> Am 12.06.2009, 18:42 Uhr, schrieb Wietse Venema <wietseporcupine.org>:
>
> > One final input: be sure to give each alias an owner-alias so that
> > Postfix will store the result of alias expansion in new queue
> > files.
> >
> > Otherwise, the result of expansion will not be stored. After failure
> > of delivery to one local recipient in the expansion, the whole
> > alias will be expanded again when delivery is retried, which is
> > something that the other recipients will not appreciate.
>
> Trying to explain this to an admin at a site I used to work for - where
> (aka. in which file and section of Postfix documentation) is this owner-*
> companion alias feature documented?

In aliases(5).

> I have a vague notion of how this works, but postconf(5) on Postfix 2.5.5
> (openSUSE 11.1) isn't particularly elucidating, and neither are
> cleanup(8), trivial-rewrite(8) manpages (or qmgr(8), but that's not
> concerned with rewriting), nor are virtual(5), generic(5), or
> canonical(5) - the best you find is that owner-* and *-request are
> treated special and, in a different place (postconf 5) that these bypass
> splitting if recipient_delimiter is "-".
>
> Am I missing documentation or is documentation on this feature too
> terse?

It is terse.

        Wietse

PS I am joking here. Matthias is an old-time Postfix user and I am
always glad to see him contribute. I think the owner-mumble
explanation in the 300k alias thread is the most detailed one that
has been written down sofar.