Retiring a mailbox name

[fallguy]

There should be a way to retire a mailbox name. What I mean is this: When another organization's MTA connects to my MTA and tries to send a message to, say, joebloe@example.net, my MTA should refuse that message.

Here's why this is important: joebloe@example.net gets almost nothing but spam. Now, I could accept that mail and send it to the bitbucket. But why waste the resources to do that? My MTA should just be able to tell any other organization's MTA's that this is not a valid mailbox name. Also, if the sender is not a spammer, then he will get a returned mail reply, so he will know that his email was not received.

If I were to receive the mail and send it to the bitbucket, I could probably find a way to send a bounce message back to the sender. But, besides that being wasteful of resources, it's not the best behavior for a good netizen, because the return path is not authenticated. That means I could be partly to blame for "joe jobs." (Joe job is when an innocent user gets innundated with undeliverable mail replies because a spammer used his address as the return path.)

So, the best option, by far, is just to refuse mail for joebloe at the initial SMTP transfer.

If anyone knows how to do ths with sendmail, please let me know. Keep in mind that I also have the catch-all mailbox enabled.

[Chris]

Fallguy,

I would use a procmailrc recipe.

http://www.google.com/search?q=procmailrc+recipe+reject+certain+recipien t
http://www.google.com/search?q=procmailrc+recipes

NOTE: Always backup your /etc/procmailrc file before making any changes. Keep in mind, the more recipes you have, the longer it takes to parse incoming email. This could also cause a load on the server, which may effect performance.

Hope this helps...

[concepts]

My server is refusing invalid emails to an invalid user at the moment. Which is good, I suppose, less load.

However, during the past week, I was using an alias to ween away from one of my personal email addresses (which is being spammed to DEATH!!!)

Unfortunately, I didnt realize the server was refusing emails to aliases until I did a test email and received a 505 error (invalid user/does not exist).

Its checking main accounts but not the aliases for valid users.

The reason I was using an alias is during the transistion I am able to filter the "new" valid emails easily with the "to:" address

What I'll probably end up doing is making the old account an alias (which will fall into a spam folder) and making the alias name the main account so it will validate.