In article <407907a7$0$435$8eec23a@newsreader.tycho.net>,
John DuBois <spcecdt@deeptht.armory.com> wrote:
>In article <HvyDBB.1rvv@wjv.com>, Bill Vermillion <bv@wjv.com> wrote:
>>nouser: /dev/null.

>>Then you can alias the user to 'nouser'

>The problem with this is that all such users will continue to be
>valid addresses forevermore. Anyone who sends legitimate mail to
>them will have their mail disappear into a black hole, spammers
>will send ever more traffic to them, mail generated automatically
>for those users will go unnoticed, etc. You really want to be
>able to mark all such addresses as no longer valid.

Maybe I wasn't clear. It's a double alias.

The users do not exist so there can be no legitimate mail going to
them. Spammers don't seem to pay any attention to anything
coming back, IF they even see it. So much I see comes from bad
addresses or forged addresses, that I've taken to throwing away
anything that's not right. It's not what I'm supposed to do but
the resources would be strained to the limits if I tried to bounce
all bad addresses back.

I do use sendmail and the virtualuser table, and for all legitimate
users they are in the virtusertable and then a wildcard for
all other names at that domain are re-routed to nouser.

The nouser: /dev/null is permanent, and then you can add/remove
users that are aliased to nouser.

If you look at the addresses from spammers you'll see in many an
alpha progression, bill1@xxx, bill2@xxxx, bill3@xxxxx. The ones
who send those just hope something matches. Bouncing mail back
to the sender won't work either as most of the time I've found the
mails come from bogus addresses, or the sender has had their mail
turned off by the provider or their incoming mailbox is full.

Admittedly I have to approach things differently as one domain I
admin is a popular web site. There were THREE legitimate email
accounts on it. When the spam levels crossed 300,000/day to that
one daomin, I had to move the MX records to point to another
server, and then the web admins made new names for contacts that
pointed to another domain, so there are now no legitimate email
names for that domain. Now I'm down to only 25,000 spams a day
for that domain, and that is for a site with no MX records at all
- they just try to sendmail to the address of the web site.

Bill


--
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com