You can do this in Qmailadmin. There was some question as to whether
Qmailadmin worked. I found that it does and makes the setting changes
described below by Dan. I also think that 'bounce-no-mailbox' is a bad
option.
On 7/11/2016 10:29 AM, Dan McAllister - QMT DNS Admin wrote:
The CORRECT way to do this is to create the .qmail-default file with an
entry that says:
| /home/vpopmail/bin/vdelivermail ‘’ *delete*
NOTE: Extra spaces added for readability on “variable width font” readers J
You will find the DEFAULT entry says “bounce-no-mailbox” where I have
delete above.
I haven’t been following this thread, but I assume you were using an
email address instead of “bounce-no-mailbox” to create your catchall
account?
If not, that would be the appropriate way to do so.
Now I can’t just reply to HOW without adding my 2-cents worth as to why
I think “bounce-no-mailbox” is the WORST of the options:
- It allows spammers to “mine” your domain for “good” email
addresses (which then get sold!)… how? Send a note to [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>, [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>,
etc. For each one that does NOT get a bounceback, you have a good
address! SPAM IT!
- Once your domain is “mature” (been around a few years), your
“catchall” account will get thousands of emails a day – from spammers
trying to mine your domain!
That means (to me, anyway) that you should DEFAULT to a “delete” policy…
if they send to a bad email address… oh well, I guess they won’t get a
reply! When they CHECK with the recipient, they’ll be able to figure it
out. But in the few, rare instances where there needs to be SOMETHING
done with badly addressed messages, a catchall account is superior to a
“bounce-no-mailbox” option.
Those opinions are MINE. Feel free to share in them or oppose them – but
their only value is the time you have invested in reading them, so treat
accordingly.
Have a great day all!
Dan McAllister
IT4SOHO
QMT DNS Admin (or at least I WAS!)
*From:*Angus McIntyre [mailto:[email protected]]
*Sent:* Friday, July 8, 2016 9:49 AM
*To:* [email protected]
*Subject:* Re: [qmailtoaster] catch all account and the spam
On Jul 7, 2016, at 1:10 PM, Jim Shupert <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I am wondering what a "wise" method of doing the catch all account
regarding spam might be
To limit the amount of spam that a standard user who is catch all
(me for example )
I have created a usr named [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
this "usr" has a quota of 40 MB … so it goes over quota in a day or
so...
It is ,,,,,for the sake of argument ,,,,, ALL spam.
what are you wise folk doing?
Because spammers will spam anything and everything — I have seen spam
targeting ‘email addresses’ that were obviously created by some scraper
program so dumb that it thought a message ID (something like
“[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>”) was an email account — I
would question whether there’s any value in having a catch-all. Better
to set up .qmail files for the addresses you actually want, and then
just send everything else to /dev/null.
To do that, create a ‘.qmail-default’ file for your domain, enter a ‘#’
character on the first line, and then add one blank line after it.
If you think that you might some day get useful mail sent to a catch-all
address, then you’ll probably want to do two things.
One is to set up a cron job that just throws away everything in the
catch-all account at regular intervals, so that you don’t go over quota
and start bouncing mail.
The other is to use something like procmail to filter the mail coming
into the catch-all. You can write two kinds of filters. One filter will
throw away stuff that’s known to be spam (to prevent the mailbox
overflowing, and to reduce the amount of mail you need to review
manually). The other should look for particular keywords that indicate
something that might be interesting to you, and divert that to one of
your active mailboxes.
Also consider making use of Spamdyke features — for example, rejecting
messages from domains without valid RDNS — to reduce the amount of spam
you need to process.
Angus
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