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)
