Sendmail question

[Bill Vermillion]

Ashes to ashes, and DOS to DOS Noah Davidson was heard to say 
on or about Sun, Feb 13, 2005 at 14:10 :

> I have set up a new FreeBSD box as mainly a backup mail server,
> although it is primary for a couple of domains. It is running
> sendmail 8.13.3 and it works fine, except for all the spam that
> is being sent to it to bad email addresses. I have aliased
> the root account to an email group on another server so that
> someone reads the root mail. The problem is that all the mail
> that spammers are sending to address that do not exist get
> bounced and the root account a notification (I believe it
> is the postmaster alias which is aliased to root). Is there
> any way to not have these notifications sent out. They are
> filling up the mail boxes. I just want the return to sender, but
> not to the root / postmaster as well. I have tried using the
> confCOPY_ERRORS_TO in my .mc file, but that just sends it to an
> additional account as well.

Making assumptions that your sendmail is receiving bogus mail
for accounts that you have sendmail receive here is approach you
can take.

Assume you have domains  a.com b.com and c.com and your
local-host-names has those.

Then you need to find out what users you have for each domain

If you have curly larry and moe on a.com and no one else, then you
can build a virtualusrtable that looks like this.

curly at a.com	curly
larry at a.com	larry
moe at a.com	moe
@a.com		nouser

And the accnount 'nouser' will be in your /etc/mail/aliases
file and will look like this:

nouser:  /dev/null

Run make in /etc/mail to create virtusertable.db and aliases.db
and that should get rid of the bogus names going to root.

I find the virtualusertable to be quite handy for elminating a lot
of junk.   It will only be a problem if you have a large user
base or lots of domains.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com