Re: [Exim] Email locked problem.

On Tue, Jul 20, 2004 at 10:14:15PM +0200, Leonardo Boselli said:
> On my site every e-mail senmt to a misspelled address is forwarded to
> the postmaster, to a specific account for these purpose, read and
> cleaned once a week.
> Some days ago a damned user im our network was so dumb to get a
> virus that tried to send a virus to every possible 4 to 8 letter address ...
> the system duly got them and delivered to the misaddressed mailbox.
> When i tried to read i was not able to do some operation such sorting
> and even deleting messages since it grown to 2GB FS limit.
> I renamed and a new one was created, with another 27000 messages,
> mostly os such virus (all sent in a few minutes ...).
> How can i (possibly using procmail) clean that huge file (the 2 GB one) .
> All that the rogue messages have in common is that \all have the same
> subject (and i can safly discard every message with such subject).
> Does someone has a working recipe ?
> Does {thesame|another}one have a suggestion on how to avoid the
> recurrency of the accident ?

First, this has nothing to do with exim.

Second, don't accept mail for users that don't exist. That just doesn't
make any sense due to the exact scenario you ran into and spammers that
try dictionary attacks, etc. Users that send mail to misspelled accounts
will get a bounce so they can correct the problem and re-submit. By
catering to idiots, you create a larger problem and more work - you now
have to manage even more idiots. If you really must handle misspellings,
just use a db (aliases file) with the most common ones and the sender
will have to deal with the rest. Don't blame the users for your own
configuration blunders.

Just delete the 2G file and get on with your life.