sorry for the typo in your name joe

Undo everything you did in the tutorial, and instead add the following single line to main.cf:

virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual

Yes, I would recommend that. Using MySQL for virtual tables is thoroughly dumb. ;-)

Never. (Slight exaggeration, but because it's such a bad idea that so many people keep taking as a good idea that I don't want to mince words or leave any doubt.)

If you have thousands of users (I'm not sure exactly at what point it becomes a win...maybe 20,000?) or they are spread across more than one system, you would then need to use a database. But, MySQL is never the database I would suggest for this...LDAP is far better suited for this type of storage.

(OK, so there is one exception to this rule: You have all of your users in MySQL already and they must be there because a bunch of other stuff requires them to be in MySQL. But, it's far more likely that you'll have a situation where LDAP is required.)

So, let me briefly clear up a few misconceptions about MySQL backed mail users:

They are not faster. They are dramatically slower. Not just a little slower...we're talking about an order of magnitude slower for anything less than several thousand users (again, I'm not sure how many thousand...but it's certainly in the tens of thousands.)

They are not more reliable. MySQL is trustworthy, and quite reliable. But, it's another big complicated piece of machinery that has to be working...in addition to all of the Postfix machinery. All things being equal, one complex piece of machinery is about half as likely to fail as two complex pieces of machinery.

They are not easier to manage. They look identical in the Webmin UI, and the virtual map file is an easy to understand format. Databases aren't hard to manage...but they aren't as easy to use as a text file.

And, finally, they're not easier to configure, as you've found out. ;-)

The funny thing about this whole problem is that people think that because MySQL is awesome for some tasks (and it is!), it is awesome for all tasks. But, this is not one of those situations where introducing a whole new pile of complexity is a good idea. Simpler is better.

I'm not picking on you, I'm picking on the folks who've misled you. There are about a dozen tutorials on the web for setting up Postfix for use with MySQL, and it's really easy to come away thinking it's the right way (or even only way) to setup Postfix for this kind of hosting. I don't want to criticize folks for posting helpful information on the web, but this is a pet peeve of mine...we get a lot of folks who've broken their postfix in this way, and they never needed to go to all this trouble. One line in the configuration file would have done everything they needed to do, and they wouldn't have wasted any time or had to go through all this confusion.