Re: [exim] Email for people who are no longer here. (WAS ema…

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Autor: Chris Lightfoot
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A: Sherwood Botsford
CC: exim-users, Ian Eiloart
Assumpte: Re: [exim] Email for people who are no longer here. (WAS email goes awry)
On Mon, Aug 28, 2006 at 11:14:17AM -0600, Sherwood Botsford wrote:
    [...]

> 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.
>
> Thoughts.


Two suggestions--

  - Can you run a VPN between a site on the `real'
    internet and your host, and have SMTP deliveries
    directly to your own server? (This might break the `no
    servers' rule, or there might be separate rule against
    VPNs; or there might not.)


  - At the site where you're currrently accepting mail
    for later download by fetchmail, what control over the
    alias file do you have? Are you just accepting any
    local-part at your domain, or are you transferring a
    list of valid local-parts? If the former, you'd do a
    lot better if you could send your list of registered
    users up to the server with good connectivity and have
    it accept/reject mail as appropriate. If you can put
    in a list of valid local-parts, is there any way you
    can force a failure there (e.g. using the :fail:
    syntax or in some other way)? This depends a lot on
    what your ISP lets you do, I guess.


(Not really relevant to your problem, but I take it you
don't have the option of collecting mail in the form of
batched SMTP data rather than via POP3/IMAP?)

--
``Started with a knife, then degenerated to a hacksaw, then a hammer and
eventually a very big hammer. Suffice to say, I don't think they are in
any way user serviceable.'' (Chris King, on electric toothbrush repair)