Re: [webmin-l] Email Question

[John H. <web...@ew...>]

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'?

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.

And again thanks for this great system!

John Hinton