Can sendmail be configured to discard routed email that has been rejected by the next hop?
Posted
by Guy Bolton King
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Published on 2010-04-21T10:30:33Z
Indexed on
2010/04/21
10:33 UTC
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Hit count: 236
sendmail
|virtusertable
Background:
- We have a handful of hosts (running sendmail) acting as the MXs for a few domains each.
- Each domain is handled via the sendmail/cf
/etc/mail/virtusertable
, with a set of known recipients and a catch-all reject rule. - Mail to postmaster on each host is aliased to root, and root is aliased to
root+<host>@ourdomain.com
. - The MX for ourdomain.com is Google Apps, and
[email protected]
is a simple group that forwards to the admins. - Google Apps will reject some emails at the SMTP stage, usually because of illegal attachments (instead of accepting them and filing them as spam).
Problem:
Given a particular spam email sent to a domain in a virtusertable
entry:
- If the recipient address rejects the mail, then sendmail will try and send a DSN to the sender.
- If that sender also rejects the mail (because it's a falsified sender, and the MX for the sender rejects the mail as spam), then sendmail sends a DSN to the postmaster.
- The routing detailed above takes place, and...Google Apps rejects the mail as well.
- sendmail now gives up with a "savemail panic", and leaves the mail in the queue forever.
- Our mail queue fills up with garbage
Is there any way I can get sendmail to discard messages that have been rejected by the next virtusertable hop (i.e. after step 1 in the Problem description)? Or does anyone have any other solutions to this?
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