Bouncing individual email addresses

[Antony Stone]

On Friday 08 August 2003 8:50 pm, Kevin Spicer wrote:

> >If you want to avoid the MS processing overhead for these users, why
> >not set rules for "Spam Checks = " so that those users are listed as "no" 
> >and not bother to do any spam checking for them at all?   Then just let the
> >relay machine deliver them as quickly as possible to the system which *can*
> >do proper address mapping to either dump the email to /dev/null or else
> >return "no such user".
>
> This is not such a good idea, my experience is that most messages for
> people who have left are spam and what tends to happen is this....
>
> MS machine receives mail
> attempts to forward to internal server (exchange in my case)
> internal server rejects mail because user doesn't exist
> MS machine attempts to return mail to sender with a delivery failure
> notification.
> Because sender address is often forged the bounce sits in the queue for
> 5 days before being sent to the local postmaster.

This is a good reason for not trying to bounce the mail with "no such user" 
unless it can be done on the receiving MTA (which, very happily, according to 
Trever Furnish, it can be, even when it's only acting as a relay).

Hence my alternative suggestion that mail for those users be forwarded to 
/dev/null on the 'real' mail server.

Regards,

Antony.

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