I'll try to introduce my premises first; please correct me if I got something wrong...
I'm pretty certain that a MTA has two ways of telling the sender that a user does not exist:
1) rejecting: telling the mailserver that delivers the mail in that the user does not exist and quitting the connection,
2) bouncing: first accepting the mail, then sending the sender a bounce mail that the user does not exist.
The second approach seems to be a bit bad to me, because then the MTA sends a bounce to the possibly forged (and therefore maybe non-existant) sender, which may bounce back.
As far as I understand, /etc/courier/aliasdir/.courier-default provides means to create a catch-all account. That means: if a user does not exist, but .courier-default has sensible content, the mail server would never reject a mail, but may still be able to bounce it if .courier-default contains the appropiate script.
Now my questions:
1) If /etc/aliasdir/.courier-default does not exist, how does courier-mta react on receiving a mail for a non-existant user? Does it reject or bounce the mail?
2) Is there any way to make sure that courier-mta a) first accepts the body of the mail, b) forwards it to a catch-all account and then c) rejects the mail instead of bouncing? (I suspect not, since accepting the body maybe means accepting the mail, but I'd like to have a definitive answer here...)
3) If 2) is not possible, how do I forward the mail to a catch-all account _and_ bounce it? (I'm pretty sure that's possible)
My intention: Since spammers may assume that an unrejected mail means that the address is valid, I want to reject (not bounce) any mail to non-existant users. That also keeps a bit of bounce traffic away from my server.
But I also like to have exactly these mails in a separate account so I can spot typos in the address and forward the mail to the correct addressee (mails with typos in the address are common here).
Maybe I'm on false premises here... feel free to correct me if I'm wrong in any point. Sadly, I cannot even imagine more keywords that may yield an answer to my questions. My searches either did not yield any result or were way too general...
I'm running courier 0.44.2 (package from backports.org) on Debian woody.
cya Dave KLiczbor
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