While this may have been a great design decision initially, it is now
causing havoc
with non-existant (but used-to-exist) users who are not getting deleted from
mailing
lists because the list operators only seem to be responding to the error
messages
from the smtpd daemon itself.
I know that the "problem" is really the list maintainers who aren't
processing the
bounces, but I'm guessing that this will get worse over time and not better
(no
matter how much yelling and screaming we do).
Eric Calvert
----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Pentchev" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Eric Calvert" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2001 10:48
Subject: Re: Need help with bounce-no-user
> On Wed, Aug 08, 2001 at 09:01:02AM -0500, Eric Calvert wrote:
> >
> > I'm using qmail 1.03 and vpopmail 3.4.11. Whenever someone tries to
send an
> > email to a non-existant email address at any of my virtualdomains, they
will
> > get a bounce message if bounce-no-user is set by having "|vdelivermail
''
> > bounce-no-user" in the .qmail-default for the domain. However, this
process
> > does NOT allow for qmail-smtpd to give a "550 User does not exist" error
> > message to the sending MTA. Instead,
> > qmail-smtpd give a "250 ok" message.
> >
> > Did I misconfigure something? Is there a way for qmail-smtpd to do the
> > lookup and return a 550 error to the sending MTA when the user does not
> > exist?
>
> qmail-smtpd, with or without vpopmail, never gives a 'user does not exist'
> error. It does not do VRFY or EXPN, either. AFAIK, this was a deliberate
> decision on Dan Bernstein's part, so that spammers / address collectors
> have no real way to figure out if a given user@domain exists, short of
> actually sending e-mail - and sending e-mail means traffic on their part,
> and logs on your part, so you know you are a target of attempted spam.
>
> IMHO, this is a good decision.
>
> Apart from this reasoning, implementing address checks in qmail-smtpd
> would be both hard to do and harsh on qmail's modularity - that would
> mean integrating most of qmail-queue and qmail-local's logic into
> qmail-smtpd. Currently, qmail-smtpd is blissfully unaware of any
> concept of local users, local domains, virtual domains, aliases and
> so on - all it does is, listen to somebody who wants to speak SMTP,
> then hand what they've said to qmail-queue to figure out.
>
> Well, ok, so qmail-smtpd already knows about domains; the rest
> still stands :)
>
> G'luck,
> Peter
>
> --
> The rest of this sentence is written in Thailand, on
>
