[BlueOnyx:22483] Re: Backscatter problem

[Ken Hohhof]

OK, I realize you are asking a technical question which I'm not answering.

 

But if you or the customer is in the U.S., and they are sending out bulk
emails without checking and processing removal requests and bounce messages,
you need to fire this customer.  I don't care how worthy a cause their
organization may be.  If this is outside the U.S., I don't know what the
legal issues may be, but probably similar.  And legal issues aside, you
shouldn't tolerate a customer sending out bulk mail without accepting the
responsibilities of a bulk mailer.  And you risk getting your mailserver IP
address blacklisted as a spam-friendly ISP.

 

You can still host their website, but if they can't honor their obligation
to maintain their mailing list, they need to get a bulk mailing service that
will do this automatically for them.  It ain't rocket science.  There are
many bulk email services that will automatically process removal requests as
well as removing addresses for repetitive bounces.  Even if you set up a
list for them using Mailman, I believe it has bounce processing.

 

Have you tried increasing their mailbox quota?  Or some kind of script that
deletes messages older than X days, we don't use BO as our mailserver, but
we run a script like I describe on all the Junk mailboxes to automatically
delete anything older than 14 days.

 

From: Blueonyx <blueonyx-bounces at mail.blueonyx.it> On Behalf Of Chuck Tetlow
Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2018 11:22 AM
To: BlueOnyx Mail List <blueonyx at blueonyx.it>
Subject: [BlueOnyx:22482] Backscatter problem

 

Hi BlueOnyx experts, 

I've got a server with a customer who is a volunteer service organization.
They use their site to send out a LOT of email from their organization, to
all their members and visitors alike.  So I'd have to guess dozens of emails
each week with each message going to hundreds of people.  

Obviously some of those are going to bounce back, whether from SPAM measures
or just simple problems like closed accounts or quota reached on the other
end.  And here is my problem - the accounts they use to send out those
e-mails are not being checked/cleaned regularly, so they fill up and then
cause a bounces to the bounce message.  In fact, I've been checking that
server multiple times a day for the last two weeks - and it always has 30 to
100 message in the outgoing queue that are undeliverable.   When I first
noticed the problem - there were messages in the queue up to five days old,
with a total over 600 messages in that outgoing queue. 

I can and have been dumping them into a separate folder, to get them out of
the queue - but I'd like to prevent them going there in the first place.  So
I was wondering if anyone knew how to set Sendmail so it would NOT generate
a bounce message when it can't deliver a incoming message. 

I'd like to configure it so when something comes in to one of their central
accounts, which is full - Sendmail will NOT send back a error saying
undeliverable.  I'd like to configure that for just some accounts, not all.
But would seriously consider all of that site's accounts, or even all on the
server - just to eliminate this swamp of backscatter going back and forth. 

Thanks everyone.  And an early Happy Thanksgivings to all! 


Chuck 




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.blueonyx.it/pipermail/blueonyx/attachments/20181113/66ac26f9/attachment.html>