Hi Sándor,

On Friday 26 May 2006 19:40, Gordon Messmer wrote:
> As practical advice, I recommend against doing so.  By doing so, you're
> solving the wrong problem.  If your mail filter is accepting mail
> without validating the recipients, and passing it on to courier, you can
> bet that you're going to generate a *ton* of backscatter.  Now, first,
> the problem is going to be that you're going to bounce a whole lot of
> mail to people who didn't sent it, but whose address was hijacked by
> spammers.  Eventually, the problem is going to hit you, too.  The mail
> queue on the firewall is going to fill with tens of thousands of
> messages that can't be delivered, because the recipient address is
> invalid, and can't be bounced, because the source address is invalid,
> too.  Once that happens, valid deliveries are going to start taking a
> very long time, again.
>
> Really, you want your "firewall" to validate recipient addresses.

If you need a second opinion on this: I can only stronlgy second Gordon's 
advice. About 1 year my primary MX for ~300 domains ran qmail without any 
patches. QMail in its standard distribution is not capable of rejecting mails 
on SMTP-Level. It first accepts any mail, and then checks if the 
email-address is valid, and if not, a Non-Delivery-Notification is generated.

I was swamped with backscatter and the server was more busy trying to deliver 
the Non-Delivery-Notifications than delivering legit mails. There were almost 
always 1000+ mails in my queue, most of them backscatter.

Then I switched to courier with mail rejection on SMTP-Level. To give you some 
figures: the average number of mails in the queue is now ~50. And if you're 
paying for your traffic by volume you be interested in the fact that I was 
able to cut my mail-traffic down to 1/10th after I switched to courier. With 
QMail I had about 300GB per month, with courier I have a mere 30GB per month.

The bottom line being: maybe you should consider setting up a courier server 
who knows all valid e-mail-addresses in a DMZ and then forwards any _valid_ 
e-mail through via the firewall to a courier server behind the firewall.  
Otherwise you could try to turn off the SMTP-proxy in your firewall and do a 
straight port forwarding letting the courier server behind your firewall 
handle all the SMTP-traffic (though for security reasons I'd strongly suggest 
setting up the DMZ).

HTH and I didn't bore you :)

-- 
Regards,

Arno.


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