Stop Delivery Failure bounces to Postmaster

Hi,

I have recently been inundated with what looks like legitimate email,
however the incoming addresses are slightly modified such as adding a
number or letter or both to the address which of course then bounces.
It started on Easter monday and is continuing currently. I have anti-
spam measures in place but it does not pick it up. In order to reduce
my administrative issue of having to delete the hundreds of messages
each day it was suggested to turn off delivery of Undeliverable
messages(or copies at least) to the Postmaster account.

How is this done in Sendmail 8.13.1? I realize I could also create a
rule in my mail client to send to the trash any messages from
Postmaster or that have Delivery Failure in the subject line as well,
but thought I would at least make an attempt at correcting at the mail
server rather than it actually even being sent.

Thanks in advance,

John

Re: Stop Delivery Failure bounces to Postmaster

gomer81@gmail.com schrieb:
> I have recently been inundated with what looks like legitimate email,
> however the incoming addresses are slightly modified such as adding a
> number or letter or both to the address which of course then bounces.

Not "of course". It shouldn't bounce. It should be rejected immediately
during the SMTP session.

> In order to reduce
> my administrative issue of having to delete the hundreds of messages
> each day it was suggested to turn off delivery of Undeliverable
> messages(or copies at least) to the Postmaster account.

That is of course possible (just set the confCOPY_ERRORS_TO variable to
an empty value in your sendmail.mc file) but a much better solution
would be to avoid generating those bounce messages in the first place.
For one thing, even if you don't send them to the Postmaster account,
you will still send them out to the forged sender addresses, which is
called backscatter and is the whole point of the exercise from the
spammer's point of view. So you'll be helping the spammer and risk
ending up on blacklists.

HTH
T.

--
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