Sending mail to /dev/null without scanning

[Julian Field]

Cameron B. Prince wrote:
> Hey guys,
>
> I have been getting a lot of emails coming in with CC's to every-name-known
> to-man at mydomain.com. It bothered me that so many of my mail server's
> resources and my internet connection were both being used to send bounces
> and that this could also be an attempt to determine valid addresses.
>
> I did some research and came up with creating an alias like this:
>
> garbage: /dev/null
>
> Then in my virtusertable I have something like this:
>
> bob at host.com	bob
> tim at host.com	tim
> @host.com		garbage
>
> It works, but now instead of bouncing, the messages are all scanned and then
> sent to /dev/null. I need to configure MailScanner so that it doesn't scan
> these messages destined for oblivion.
>   
You cannot use a destination location (such as /dev/null) in a ruleset, 
as MailScanner is not involved with the final mail delivery, and so 
doesn't know anything about any aliases files.

The only way to do it would be to have a ruleset which knows all about 
the exact addresses you want to keep, and trash the rest. Whether you do 
this in your MTA or in MailScanner, you still need a list of the legal 
addresses.

In MailScanner you could switch off scanning for unknown addresses, by using
Scan Messages = %rules-dir%/scan.messages.rules
And then in scan.messages.rule put
To: bob at host.com yes
To: tim at host.com yes
To: *@host.com no
FromOrTo: default yes

You could easily automatically generate this file from your 
virtusertable with a short script.

-- 
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
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