Vicious Circle

[Martin Hepworth]

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> I really hate spammers, no really, I hate them. The world does not need
> these people.
>
> I have two mailscanner machines listening on the outside, both use
> mailertable to route to my mail toasters running qmail/vpopmail. I had
> been getting buried with dictionary attacks so I installed chkuser to my
> qmail-smtp daemons. Excellent, now my qmail queue is dropping, load is
> coming down, no more deliveries to non-existant users.
>
> Unfortunately now my MailScanner machines queues are filling up with
> these insidious undeliverable bounces. Arrrrgggggg!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
> I have MailScanner reset so it can process the additional messages,
> increased my number of processes to 5 per cpu (10) and MailScanner is
> pushing them right on through. Good. I've set Sendmail's
> Double_Bounce_Address to an emtpy string which should drop double bounces.
>
> But my outgoing queue continues to grow with bounces becuase I can't
> deliver the "No User Here" bounces from my toasters.
>
> I am at a loss, the root of the issue is I have 100k messages a day,
> some just *might* be legitimate address misspellings, I can't drop all
> bounces. But the vast majority are trash.
>
> Whats a sysadmin to do?
>
> DAve
>
> --
> Dave Goodrich

Dave
As others have said doing the check user on the inbound MailScanner queue
so you can reject with 550 no such user message is prob the best way.

I guess it's quite difficult to maintain this list but you might be able
to do a live check on the valid users using LDAP or something

I drop about 66% of inbound email this way.

--
Martin Hepworth
Snr Systems Administrator
Solid State Logic
Tel: +44 (0)1865 842300

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