Re: [webmin-l] Email Question

[Jamie C. <jca...@we...>]

On 17/Nov/2006 17:20 John Hinton wrote ..
> Jamie Cameron wrote:
> > On 17/Nov/2006 16:46 John Hinton wrote ..
> >   
> >> Am I right in assuming that if I set an email alias in Virtualmin to
> >> bounce, that it is in fact a bounce and not a reject? If so, are there
> >> any suggestions on setting up rejects on particular addresses?
> >>
> >> The problem is spammers have started using what up until now were 
> >> 'sacred' email addresses. System addresses. Webmaster, root, mail, uucp,
> >> and on and on. I really would rather reject them instead of allowing
> >> them to come in, get processed through SpamAssassin (the resource hog)
> >> in particular before they get dumped to /dev/null.. or worse, wind up
> in
> >> my inbox as I do receive webmaster, postmaster, abuse and root. Root
> >> gets a lot dumped to it.
> >>     
> >
> > If you setup an alias to bounce email, it will be applied before any
> > spam filtering. SpamAssassin only gets run on email delivered to local
> > mailboxes, which won't happen here..
> >
> >  - Jamie
> >   
> Don't you just love being a Linux sysadmin instead of just the master 
> behind Webmin?
> 
> OK, duh.. that is right. So, delivery to /dev/null is not so server 
> intensive. But, just to be sure, this is a 'bounce' and not a 'reject'?

Virtualmin offers two options - bouncing, and 'throwing away' the message,
which delivers to /dev/null.

> These days bouncing is a very bad idea which will land you on SpamCop 
> blacklist to name just one. And, I really don't want to bounce to 
> someone who didn't send the email to start with, which would be the case
> with 99.999% of these emails. BTW, the latest new 'surge' in spamming 
> methods is via bouncing (to spoofed email addresses) off some poorly 
> setup server.
> 
> I'm actually trying to figure out a way to do a reject on this type of
> mail. Yes, root@<servername> needs to work, but 
> root@<some_domain_on_that_server> is just bothersome junkmail that I 
> would love to reject.
> 
> I've been thinking about using your new Virtualmin default email 
> addresses to automatically create /dev/null addresses for these 
> accounts... but.. I'd really like the real sender to know that these are
> not good addresses as well as just not bother my system with actually 
> receiving the junk.

Currently, it creates aliases for those addresses pointing to the
domain owner, which is the RFC-specified correct thing to do. But you
can change this in the server template if you like ..

 - Jamie