Valid places to redirect mail to?

[volume]

Simple reply to you squirrel - thanks.

volume.

[PWSowner]

Simple reply to you squirrel - thanks.

volume.

No problem.

[dezignguy]

That's probably Outlooks poor interpretation of the SMTP failure to accept delivery, probably because you're effectively sending it locally. If you try from a third party email (e.g. hotmal, yahoo, etc) you'll probably get a proper bounce message.

'sending it locally', as in using smtp auth to login to the server, vs just another mail server sending on the message? I'm actually sending over an ssh tunnel, port 25 on my local machine forwards over ssh to port 25 on my server.

But anyways, it wasn't too major, and I was prepared to live with it. I was just curious what error people sending to the disabled account would get back. And imho the error I got wasn't all that informative. Maybe I'll test it from my webmail account on another server and see what I get - sometime when I have some extra time.

[sivadc]

Hope someone can help me out here.

I am using ":fail: address not valid for this domain" on one of my domains. I attempted to test it by sending an email from hotmail and yahoo to an invalid address on the domain. The exim_rejectlog shows the emails being rejected because of an invalid address but I did not receive any notification from either hotmail/yahoo or my mail server. I understand that my mail server will no longer send bounce messages for :fail: but shouldn't the hotmail and yahoo email servers notify me? Is there something that I'm missing?

[chirpy]

They certainly should provide you with the bounce, though it doesn't necessarily follow that they will. Did you check whether the bounce ended up in your Junk/Bulk Mail folder and that you turned off any spam/etc filtering on your webmail account, just incase it's being filtered out somewhere?

[brianoz]

Just a quick comment ... noticed nobody else seemed to have commented on the reason blackhole was bad ...

If someone emails a user and mis-spells the user's name, their email is blackholed! They'll assume it's been received, whereas it will have just not got there in the first place!

With the dictionary attack prevention (thanks for that!!), there's no longer a need for blackholes.

[sivadc]

They certainly should provide you with the bounce, though it doesn't necessarily follow that they will. Did you check whether the bounce ended up in your Junk/Bulk Mail folder and that you turned off any spam/etc filtering on your webmail account, just incase it's being filtered out somewhere?

I checked the junk/bulk mail folders thinking that might have been the reason, but they were empty too. Have you ever sent emails to invalid addresses on your servers that you have set to ":fail:" in order to test the response? Only reason why I ask is maybe I am making too big a deal out of people receiving notification. As long as my server responds correctly that's all that matters, right? Thanks for your help by the way, I appreciate it.

[chirpy]

The easiest test would be to watch exim_mainlog and then send the email from hotmail/yahoo and see how the server responds:

tail -f /var/log/exim_mainlog

If it looks like it is rejecting it OK with a 550 messages, then I wouldn't worry about it.

I have indeed tested the :fail: directive to death and it does work

[sivadc]

I've been monitoring exim_mainlog and exim_rejectlog and it looks to be responding correctly. Does this look right?

From mainlog:
2004-11-23 12:45:00 H=(hotmail.com) [65.54.247.20] F=<sivadc222@hotmail.com> rejected RCPT <test@b*******.net>: address not valid for this domain

From rejectlog:
2004-11-23 12:45:00 H=(hotmail.com) [65.54.247.20] F=<sivadc222@hotmail.com> rejected RCPT <test@b*******.net>: address not valid for this domain

As long as my server's responses are correct I guess that's all that matters.

[sivadc]

Well, guess what? I seem to be getting the bounce messages now from yahoo and hotmail (I even received bounces for the test messages I sent last week).


No clue what happened but nonetheless, I appreciate all the help.