Quarantine and non-existing email addresses

Hello,

I'm using Amavisd-new with SpamAssassin between two sendmail
deamons - 
incoming and outgoing.
I've set up quarantine level, so some "spammy"
emails go to single 
mailbox called "spams". Now once for a while
(daily mostly) I'm going 
through all those emails to catch some false positives. Most
of the 
times it's only spam, rarely single email trapped.
Now to the point.
Most of those trapped messages are being sent to addresses
which do not 
exist in my mail server. So without SA they'd have gone to
postmaster. 
Is it possible to get all those messages to be dropped, or
better to be 
stored in some other mailbox/mailfolder ?

I'm sorry if someone already asked similar question - I
can't find 
answer myself.


Pawel Lesniak


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Paweł Leśniak wrote the following on 5/28/2007 1:32 AM
-0800:
> Hello,
>
> I'm using Amavisd-new with SpamAssassin between two
sendmail deamons - 
> incoming and outgoing.
> I've set up quarantine level, so some
"spammy" emails go to single 
> mailbox called "spams". Now once for a while
(daily mostly) I'm going 
> through all those emails to catch some false positives.
Most of the 
> times it's only spam, rarely single email trapped.
> Now to the point.
> Most of those trapped messages are being sent to
addresses which do not 
> exist in my mail server. So without SA they'd have gone
to postmaster. 
> Is it possible to get all those messages to be dropped,
or better to be 
> stored in some other mailbox/mailfolder ?
>
> I'm sorry if someone already asked similar question - I
can't find 
> answer myself.
>
>   
Look to the MTA (sendmail in your case) to do this.  You
should be doing
some sort of recipient validation at the MTA level and
rejecting mail to
non-existent accounts.  This will save you a bunch of cpu
cycles by not
having to virus scan and spam filter all of those bogus
e-mails.

I run postfix, and have never run sendmail, so I can't tell
you how to
do this, but I have no doubt that sendmail supports
recipient
validation.  Look to the sendmail documentation on how to do
this.

Bill

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Pawe³,

> I'm using Amavisd-new with SpamAssassin between two
sendmail deamons -
> incoming and outgoing. [...]
> Most of those trapped messages are being sent to
addresses which do not
> exist in my mail server. So without SA they'd have gone
to postmaster.
> Is it possible to get all those messages to be dropped,
or better to be
> stored in some other mailbox/mailfolder ?

Once messages to non-existent users are accepted by the
first MTA,
it too late for any other reasonable handling. The problem
needs
to be solved at its origin, not workarounds sought.

Nowadays MTAs have a way of rejecting mail straight away, if
they are
addressed to nonexistent users. This comes out of the box
with Postfix,
but I don't know what is the most elegant way to do it with
sendmail.
One possibility is using 'virtusertable', as noted in
README.sendmail-dual.
There may be a better way, you may want to ask on a
sendmail-specific
mailing list.

  Mark

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Just to provide some numbers, here are our reject statistics
as of a Postfix 
reporting script.

In the first month of using recipient validation at MTA
level, reject rate was 
around 53% (Monday, 190kmsgs rejected).

Yesterday (Monday), 4 months later: 39% rejects (160kmsgs
rejected).

Number of "received" inbound messages has gone up
by 30% in 4 months.


I don't know if these numbers show that spammers have both
stopped trying 
random addresses and started bombing valid ones or something
else; but I am 
sure our SMTP listeners in the last days have been doing a
lot of work!

Paolo

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