? capabilities of dropping messages

i use sendmail as an internet facing server for my internal mail
servers

it's also processes production data msgs for our customers

we can't let these msgs sit in a mail queue & have alerts trigger when
queue size reaches threshold

i receive lots of spam to non-existant accounts w/ bogus return
addresses

these msgs can't be returned & sit in my mail queue eventually
triggering my alarms

i want to drop these spam msgs that can't be immediately returned

but i don't want to drop msgs that are waiting for internal mail
server to come back on line

is this possible w/ sendmail ?

Re: ? capabilities of dropping messages

On 11/06/07 07:52, shanekennedy00@netscape.net wrote:
> i receive lots of spam to non-existant accounts w/ bogus return
> addresses
>
> these msgs can't be returned & sit in my mail queue eventually
> triggering my alarms
>
> i want to drop these spam msgs that can't be immediately returned

What you are talking about is commonly known as back scatter.

> but i don't want to drop msgs that are waiting for internal mail
> server to come back on line

Naturally.

> is this possible w/ sendmail ?

Yes. If you change your request slightly, it is very easy to accomplish
what you are wanting to do.

Educate your Sendmail server as to what users are valid recipients.
Thus if you receive an email to a recipient that is not on the list, the
recipient is known to be fake and thus the message can be rejected out
right and never be accepted in to the server and queue.

If you want to verify the sending email address you can install a milter
that will do call backs to verify the validity of the sending email address.



Grant. . . .