How to stop a cascade of mail delivery failure messages

Dan Coutu coutu at snowy-owl.com
Wed Dec 15 11:36:00 EST 2004


A client seems to have a situation whereby a forged,
and invalid, address in their domain was used to send
out spam. Some of the recipient addresses are also
bogus and therefore cause a mail delivery failure.
This bounces back to the invalid user on their mail
server and causes another mail delivery failure back
to the original recipient's system. I'm getting the
impression from my client's description that this
bouncing back and forth is not stopping at this point
but rather is continuing.

So first let me ask, does sendmail actually work this
way, with no limit on ping-pong bounces? If it does
then there must certainly be a way to stop it, such as
silently dropping failed mail. I'm going to guess that
a tweak to sendmail.cf will do the trick and am off to
research that. I figured I'd check with the group as well
just in case I can learn even more about the situation,
which is usually the case with this bunch!

Thanks!

-- 

Dan Coutu
Managing Director
Snowy Owl Internet Consulting, LLC
http://www.snowy-owl.com/







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