[Exim] 3.36, sender reject, no error messages?

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Author: Hugh Sasse Staff Elec Eng
Date:  
To: EXIM users list
Subject: [Exim] 3.36, sender reject, no error messages?
We have a new machine and when the rest of that arrives I'll explore
Exim 4 in depth. Meanwhile, on our Exim 3.36 system, we have some
addresses we expand by alias into lists of people. I shall call the
address in question xyz@???, for the sake of this argument.

Spammers have got hold of this address, and are sending us the usual
fare with senders and recipients set to xyz@???.
So we try
sender_reject_recipients = @@lsearch*;/usr/local/exim/sender_reject_recipients_data
with an entry:

dmu.ac.uk:        xyz


This works, but the bounce messages come back to xyz, and get
expanded, so everyone gets the bounces.

I tried adding a director before the system_aliases director which
used an alias file with an
xyz:    :blackhole:
entry, only acted upon if the sender was xyz.  Then I retried it
to be acted upon when the sender was <>.
However, I could not get these to work.


So I try to continue rejecting early and use the simpler solution:

sender_reject = @@lsearch:/usr/local/exim/blackhole_senders

because mail should never come *from* this list.

blackhole_senders is
---8<---
de-montfort.ac.uk        xyz


dmu.ac.uk            xyz


eng.cse.dmu.ac.uk        xyz


brains.eng.cse.dmu.ac.uk    xyz


---8<---

but I'm still getting bounces to the list.
Looking at the bounces I am still getting the bodies, so
presumably these are being processed, i.e, the rejection is not
happening as early as I would expect.

The next thing I can do is hack the system filter to reject things
with from lines matching xyz@???.... But I'll be accepting the
DATA then.

Am I even "warm", or am I barking up the wrong tree completely, to
mix metaphors :-)?

        Hugh