Bounce messages not delivered to sender

[jackflash]

There's a problem I've experienced with cPanel installs for a few years now and none of my hosts could ever resolve this problem. Now that I'm administering a few sites myself, I'd like to try again.

The problem: "Delivery failed" and "user unknown" messages always seem to be routed to the root user's main mail account rather than the actual sender of the e-mail.

Example 1: Delivery failure can happen when "user@mydomain.com" tries to send an e-mail with a banned attachment. The message is not delivered and the sender is not notified that their message did not reach the intended recipient. The delivery failure message is instead sent to the root mail account ("mydomain@mydomain.com").

Example 2: When a user sets up an autoresponder and receives spam. The supposed sender of the spam is sent an autoresponse, but since many spam source e-mail addresses are fake the autoresponse message bounces. Again the root mail account receives the message, but not the sender. Naturally, this can also happen with legitimate mail if a mail server goes down.

Anyone know what I'm talking about here? Any solutions? Thanks.

[chirpy]

These are the limitations of the little add-ons that cPanel have made. The first one is the pseudo mail scanning filter in /etc/antivirus.exim (I always empty it out), and the second is simply a flaw in all simple auto-responder systems. Either don't use it (they're not a great idea anyway and can easily get your server blackholes for the reasons you mention) or seek out a more intelligent script that you can use to pipe mails through instead of the cPanel supplied one.

[jackflash]

Thanks, Jonathan. While your answer doesn't provide me an easy "click here to fix it" solution, it is more satisfying than the ones I've received from former web hosts.

Sincerely,
Paul

[web12]

This actually seems like the same issue I have been experiencing, and have actually created a bugzilla entry for it (http://bugzilla.cpanel.net/show_bug.cgi?id=2517)

I believe this issue to be down to spamassasin, as when spamassasin is disabled for the recipient account bounces are handled correctly.

Feel free to vote or add to the ticket to get it more attention.

[chirpy]

Seems that the SpamAssassin implementation by cPanel is causing other issues too, which could be related:
http://forums.cpanel.net/cpanel-whm-discussions/39253-incoming-email-problem-post186500.html

[jackflash]

Very interesting. I hope this gets resolved in an upcoming cPanel build.

~ Paul

[Cacho]

You might want to try running /scripts/exim4 and see what happens. I had a similar problem a while back and this cleared it up.

[jackflash]

Thanks for the tip, I'll give it a whirl.

- Paul

[jackflash]

Thanks, chirpy. I tried it, but I'm still getting the delivery failure messages for other users delivered to the root account. Oh well, I guess I'll just consider this simply a known bug.

- Paul