Re: [Exim] exim -bs and illegal senders

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Author: Philip Hazel
Date:  
To: Jochen Erwied
CC: exim
Subject: Re: [Exim] exim -bs and illegal senders
On Tue, 6 May 2003, Jochen Erwied wrote:

> I'm receiving mails via UUCP as compressed batched SMTP.
>
> These batches are fed into 'exim -bs' (after decompressing)


I presume you mean -bS rather than -bs.

> Now I have the following problem with spammers: When receiving batches with
> an illegal 'MAIL FROM', the whole batch is aborted. The last example for
> this was a mail with a sender containing colons (looking like
> 'some:user:name@???') which obviously was rejected.


Early versions of Exim tried to carry on with -bS when there was a
problem, but it got very complicated. After some discussion (a couple of
years ago now, I can't remember exactly when) we reached the conclusion
that the best thing to do was to abort the entire batch and let a human
sort it out. The problem is that there is no convenient way of handling
multiple errors.

Essentially, -bS expects the input to have been previously validated.

> Is there a configuration option to accept illegal senders (didn't find any)
> or is there an option which I couldn't guess appropiate for this problem?


What would you do with an illegal sender?

Either you must pre-validate the input, or you'll need to write a
program to read the BSMTP and feed it to Exim interactively, using -bs.
Then you can catch each error as it happens, and do whatever you want.

--
Philip Hazel            University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@???      Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.