Author: Sherwood Botsford Date: To: Ian Eiloart, exim-users Old-Topics: Re: [exim] Mailing list messages go awry. Subject: [exim] Email for people who are no longer here. (WAS email goes
awry)
Ian Eiloart wrote: >
>
> --On 25 August 2006 17:26:06 -0600 Sherwood Botsford
> <sbotsford@???> wrote:
>
>> Once a
>> week or so, I go through this, adding some names to the blackhole
>> list. (As a school we have a high turnover. I forward for a year
>> after they leave, then junk anything else.)
>
> Don't do that - reject it. Otherwise people will think they're being
> ignored. Important notifications could go missing, and your school could
> -in some rare circumstances- find itself in legal hot water. Legal
> notifications that are rejected by your server are not considered
> delivered. Notifications that are black-holed can in some arbitration
> cases be considered proper legal notification.
>
We are on a satellite link, with a variable IP address. Our
conditions of use prohibit running any server on our end of the
link.
I have an ISP cache our email, and use fetchmail to pick it up
every 5 minutes. Once here, fetchmail funnels it to exim.
If exim rejects email, fetchmail regards it as undeliverd, and
doesn't delete it from the server, so next time it's there, like
a bad penny.
I suppose the best thing to do would be to set up a separate
transport for "people who used to be here" and set it up so that
exim would make one attempt to respond, saying "You recently sent
email to a user who is no longer here." If the transport failed,
it would log something and never try again.
Almost all of this email is spam. Real people know the person's
new address. I don't see much point in wasting my bandwidth
trying to send mail to mostly non-existent addresses.
