This can be a complex issue in the end, but its a simple enough question.

First some background:

Ever run a courier server (of course!), and have SMTP off for anyone not
authorized in the accept domains list (of course as well!), and yet still
get HUNDREDS of spammers ~trying~ to use your server for relay? I have, and
am. Our email server had a nasty hiccup in DNS for a day, and the backlog
got so massive that its taken 24 hours for it to clear out.

Watching the screen race by under "tail -f /var/log/maillog", I notice a
crudload of deferrers and access denies for all sorts of junk mail accounts
that do not exist on our servers, or any of our clients. Its quite crazy
really. The one that gets me is the 50 lines that shoot through ever few
minutes to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]". ?!

Anyhow... I've come to the conclusion that I want to squelch all this
outgoing deferrals.

So the big question to ask:

Is this possible?

I wish to have courier simply "throw out" anything that it would normally
not deliver or relay. All our clients know how to use our server, and an
error is just more traffic on the internet to bounce around.

I'm not so much concerned on the actual "Failure" notices that go out, but
rather all the deferrals. Those tend to just pile up, because they keep
coming back until so many deferrals have been reached that it sends a
Failure. Quite annoying.

Scenario:
spammer sends mail out trying to use your machine,
machine goes WTF NO! and instead deffers the message,
message then comes back again,
and again,
and again,
then it finally fails and courier sends a failure notice,
then the failure notice comes back to courier because that original emailer
address doesn�t exist from where they sent it (typical spammers),
then THAT returned failure notice gets filed into the deamon account on your
server.

Grr.

Simply, instead of a status; deferred message, can courier just 'ignore' it
? Throw it into /dev/null ? Or take the mail like it was GOING to send it,
but doesn't ? =)


(And don�t give me some bull about "that�s how the old internet has worked
and its proper procedure to do that". Guh... Its because of 'that', email
servers get bogged down from these idiot spammers!)



-Randall Shaw



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