From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Jens Knoell" Subject: Re: Proper procedure for bounced mails? Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2002 13:24:58 -0600 Sender: linux-admin-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <02f801c231b5$8ab03300$0264a8c0@wombie> References: <00fe01c2315a$0b292a20$0264a8c0@wombie> <20020722122857.GH29481@piku.org.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: Linux Admin ML From: "James" > On Mon, Jul 22, 2002 at 02:29:59AM -0600, Jens Knoell wrote: > | It's probably somewhat OT - is there an established procedure for bouncing > | mails? Special headers and the like? A net search wasn't exactly helpful... > | does anyone know a good resource to read up on that? > > How and why do you want to bounce email? How: from a custom, not-yet-totally-finished script that is supposed to filter all incoming mail based on certain per-user conditions in an SQL database. The idea is to bounce mails only once per sender per day. So far, I've been using "custom" reply mails, as well as informing the recipient by sending them some tiny email. So far so good - but I'd like to re-format the reply mails to be a little more compliant to standards (if there are any for such things). > Sendmail and friends automatically bounce mail if the recipient address > is unknown. I don't recommend bouncing spam as the sender address is > likely to be fake and you could accidentally mailbomb someone innocent. Correct. That's why I'd like to make sure the bounces are somewhat conforming to standard formats. On the other hand, bouncing spam does get people off spamlists - yet I can't just pretend that the user doesn't exist, as that will confuse the rare legit sender whose mail gets rejected for one reason or another. Unconditionally dropping them doesn't get people off spamlists either (tested that in lengthy experiments). To prevent mailbombing, I'd rather like to use a "warn once per day" filter on my side. > And it's probably not OT if you're using Linux mail servers ;-) *G* I am using sendmail, and started off with the old AMaViS mailfilter... by now it's not AMaViS anymore, but yes, it's Linux+sendmail+mySQL+... all the way :) Before anyone asks: The script isn't ready for prime time yet (too site-specific, lots of things hardcoded, still a few critical bugs), but I am considering to wrap it up and release it someday, although probably not in the near future - it is too embarrassing at the moment ;) Jens