Reject mail to nonexistent user (/var/qmail/control/rejectnonexist)

[Baker]

Hello.

Most bounce messages to spammers bounce back. To avoid this, in Mail Preferences > Mail to nonexistent user I specified Reject. This in turn created file /var/qmail/control/rejectnonexist.

This caused problems with sending and receiving local mail. For example when a user attempted to send mail from the Thunderbird mail client the mail server (sometimes) replied... Send Error: 421 opendir() failed (#5.7.15) No such file or directory.

Things worked correctly again when I removed that file, but now I'm back to handling double bounce messages.

My qmail environment uses poppassd and mbox format. The server args in smtp_psa are... "-Rt0 /var/qmail/bin/relaylock /var/qmail/bin/qmail-smtpd /
var/qmail/bin/smtp_auth /var/qmail/bin/true /var/qmail/bin/cmd5checkpw /var/qmai
l/bin/true"

Why would the Mail to nonexistent user Reject option cause such behavior and how can I change that behavior?

advTHANKSance

 

[jwdick]

Originally posted by Baker

Why would the Mail to nonexistent user Reject option cause such behavior and how can I change that behavior?

advTHANKSance [/B]

I don't know the answer to your question, but I believe I have a better solution than rejecting email. This next quote is from www.dnsreports.com:

OK: All of your mailservers accept mail from "<>". You are required (RFC1123 5.2.9) to receive this type of mail (which includes reject/bounce messages and return receipts).


To comply with RFC1123 5.2.9, what I did is create an email address called 'spam@klicktheweb.com'. However, I did not enable the mailbox for this email address. Then I forward all email for "non-existent" users for all domains on my server to this email address. I then checked my mail queues for the next three days to make sure that email is not piling up there and it is not. Since there is no mailbox for "spam@klicktheweb.com", the email falls off into space without rejecting or bouncing.

If no one else answers your question for you, you may want to give this a try.

 

[ghazlewood]

I'm using a Plesk 8.0.1 box and encountered this error message recently. I had not long before added some aliased domains to this file manually. It was the listing of these aliases which appears to have been causing the problem. I have since removed the aliased domains and the problem has disappeared. Maybe now aliased domains are properly built into Plesk we will see the improvement of how they are handled with respect to mail and qmail...