John Doe wrote: > I am trying to handle our noreply emails a little bit more properly. > We do send the classic "Something new... check your account" emails coming > from [EMAIL PROTECTED] > So far, I used a simple: "noreply: :fail: This account is not valid, use the > website mail" in the /etc/aliases > It seem to work, but it is not very aesthetic. I would like the response to > be clean (multiple lines of text, etc...). > So, is there a better way to handle noreplys from within exim.conf? > > You ask about how to handle an email address like [EMAIL PROTECTED] First of all, if you ever use this email address in any form, say as the origin, esp. envelope from, for mails you send out from your web page, mailing list or something like that, it's a bad idea to :fail: that address. This basically means, this address does not exist. This is the best way to prevent communication with any domain that does callback verification of the sender address with the assumption that, if the sender address is not valid, it is junk and therefore it's not worth to accept it. It's enough that many websites send out mail without a valid sender because of incompetence (senders like [EMAIL PROTECTED], no MX and no SMTP on that host), so you should not intentionally do.
Put that aside and assume you change it to :blackhole: the message is silently discarded without any further info. Which is exactly, what one should except from an address like [EMAIL PROTECTED] Further on, with a :fail: you will never get a "nice" replay for a user sending a message to that address, as it will always be wrapped in the error message generated by the sending MTA. The sending MTA, because your does generate a 550 response at SMTP time. The readability, from an end user perspective, is never great, and does not improve if you provide more text. If you like to send out a pretty message to the user, you could consider an autoreply on that address. That way you can send out pretty messages. BUT that has some drawbacks as well, as you will send out a message to the sender of every incoming one. This can be abused as well, especially if you include the original message. Imagine a spammer sending a few thousand message to this address, each time with a different forged sender. That's a good way to end up in blacklists. Oliver -- ## List details at http://lists.exim.org/mailman/listinfo/exim-users ## Exim details at http://www.exim.org/ ## Please use the Wiki with this list - http://wiki.exim.org/
