Hi Noel,

> On Oct 30, 2017, at 4:07 PM, Noel Jones <njo...@megan.vbhcs.org> wrote:
> 
>> On 10/30/2017 2:52 PM, J Doe wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> One of my mail servers (Postfix 3.1.0), is configured to perform virtual 
>> domain hosting.  It forwards mail to the virtual domain to mailboxes of 
>> users on Gmail.
>> 
>> I can see in my mail log that spam with forged origin addresses sometimes 
>> comes into my server that is addressed to virtual domain addresses.  My 
>> server rejects some of this spam and then generates a non-delivery e-mail to 
>> the origin address of the spam.  Of course, as some of those addresses are 
>> forged, my server is producing backscatter.
> 
> 
> Your mail server must have a list of valid recipients and reject
> mail to unknown recipients.  Where to list the valid recipients
> depends on how the domain is defined in postfix.  Most of what you
> need can be found in
> http://www.postfix.org/ADDRESS_CLASS_README.html
> 
> Avoid any wild-card domain rewrites since those disable recipient
> validation.
> 
> If your mail server does after-queue spam scanning, it MUST NOT
> generate a bounce for unwanted mail.  Either tag-and-deliver mail or
> scan during SMTP so you can reject (not bounce) unwanted mail.

Thank you for your reply.  

Now that I think of it, I think I left out some necessary details about my 
server in my original e-mail.

In my case, with my server configured to do virtual domain hosting (let’s say 
for the domain example.com), mail addressed to a recipient on my server gets 
forwarded to the recipient’s corresponding Gmail account.

So for example:

    Spam —> u...@example.com —> u...@gmail.com

When spam is sent to u...@example.com my server then tries to forward that to 
u...@gmail.com. GMail’s spam filters detect spam and generate an SMTP error 
code.  My server then generates a non-delivery status e-mail.  Because the spam 
had a forged origin e-mail address, my server then generates backscatter to 
that forged address.

With regards to your reply, I am not having spam addressed to an unknown 
recipient at the virtual domain (such as some_unknown_recipi...@example.com) - 
this e-mail is addressed to a valid recipient that gets blocked by GMail and 
then generates backscatter.

I did read the link you provided and I also looked at “Rejecting Unknown Local 
Recipients with Postfix”, but from that document I was under the impression 
that I got blocking of unknown recipients automatically in Postfix 3.1.0:

    “As of Postfix version 2.0, the Postfix SMTP server rejects mail for 
unknown 
    recipients in local_domains . . . This feature was optional with earlier 
Postfix 
    versions” [1]

How do I stop backscatter generated from my server in response to the bounces 
from Gmail ?

Thanks again,

- J

Sources:

[1] http://www.postfix.org/LOCAL_RECIPIENT_README.html

Reply via email to