Sendmail question

[Bill Vermillion]

On Sun, Feb 13, 2005 at 16:46 , while impersonating an expert on 
the internet, Noah Davidson sent this to stdout:

> The only problem with that approach is that this is a back up
> server and the users may not be able to know of all of the
> users. Is there any way to not have all of these bounced mail go
> to the postmaster / root account.

My personal [and sometimes warped] opinion is that if it's a backup
server then it needs to know about all accounts?

Are users supposed to access this server if the main server is
down.  You could copy/rsync the virtualuser table to the backup
machine.

The only file that seems to need a restart is the local-host-names
and aliases, virtusertable and others are dynamic so the changes
are read each time.

If you have a stock /etc/mail/aliases file the postmaster account
is aliased to root.  You do need a postmaster account, so if you
create a user called postmaster, you could unalias the postmaster
to root if that's what the main problem is.

> ________________________________
> 
> From: Bill Vermillion [mailto:bv at wjv.com]
> Sent: Sun 2/13/2005 2:30 PM
> To: Noah Davidson
> Cc: FreeBSD-ISP List
> Subject: Re: Sendmail question
> 
> 
> 
> 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
> 
> 



-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com