On Fri, 21 Aug 1998, Neil Long wrote:
> We get the occasional mail coming in with a <> sender to no longer
> existant accounts which just gets frozen with no error return. Mail from
> a valid user to the 'non-user' gets a message to this effect but how
> should we deal with these (often tenacious bounces list testers) from
> <> senders?
(1) Set receiver_verify, so that the mail doesn't get into your host in
the first place.
or
(2) Add a director to the configuration that can identify these dead
accounts and throw the message away. This of course requires you to keep
a list of the old accounts or something.
> I can see how we could use the :fail: option in an aliases file
> but that will need to be sync'd with all the user registration
> databases, etc just in case the user comes back!
When we cancel a user we don't in fact remove the account immediately.
We set the password so the account can't be used, and we change the home
directory entry in the passwd file to /home/CANCELLED. Then after a year
or so the account is really deleted. While it is in the limbo state, it
can be trivially reinstated, and it can be identified by Exim by means
of the match_directory entry in a localuser director. We have the
following configuration:
# This director handles the lookup of cancelled users who are
# identified by having their home directories set to /home/CANCELLED.
cancelled_users:
driver = localuser
transport = cancelleduser_pipe
fail_verify
directory = /home/CANCELLED
which is placed before the .forward director. The pipe sends back a
message saying the account has gone away. However, Exim will ignore this
if the sender is <>. (This could now be done using an autoreply
transport - it's just I've never changed it from yonks and yonks ago.)
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
--
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