sendmail autoresponder

Ted Mittelstaedt tedm at toybox.placo.com
Fri Feb 17 09:29:15 PST 2006


You do NOT want to setup an autoresponder like vacation!  The
FEATURE method that Giorgos explained is the correct way to do it.
If your not using sendmail and your MTA cannot issue an error in
this fashion, you do not want to mess around with this.

What happens with autoresponders is that spammers inadvertantly
trigger them.  As a result the autoresponses get sent to thousands of
victims who had their names forged to the spammers message.  Some
of those victim addresses are spamtrap addesses.  With the result
that if you setup an autoresponder and a spammer hits it, your
site will get blacklisted.  The Sendmail method does not have this
problem because the error message is returned during the transmission
phase, to the sending mailserver, it is not e-mailed to the envelope
address.

An autoresponder that only sends autoresponses to a defined list of
senders is OK.  But one that sends to anyone is a Bad Thing!

Ted

>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of James Csoka
>Sent: Friday, February 17, 2006 9:06 AM
>To: Dave; freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>Subject: Re: sendmail autoresponder
>
>
>This isn't a sendmail solution, but I use openwebmail for my company's
>webmail interface, and it has an autoresponder option.  It'll
>send back an
>email response, and you can simply set up filtering to dump the incoming
>mail to the trash folder.
>
>-jim
>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Dave" <dmehler26 at woh.rr.com>
>To: <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>
>Sent: Friday, February 17, 2006 11:24 AM
>Subject: sendmail autoresponder
>
>
>> Hello,
>>     I've got a box that i took over that runs sendmail,
>mailscanner, and
>sa
>> for antispam. There's an email address at one of the domains that the
>owner
>> has indicated he would like an autoresponder hooked to it.
>THe objective
>is
>> whenever someone sends to that address it won't be delivered
>to a mailbox,
>> but dropped and the autoresponder msg will be sent back. I'm
>a sendmail
>> newbie in the extreme and would appreciate any advice.
>> Thanks.
>> Dave.
>>
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