On Tue, Sep 22, 1998 at 03:47:46PM +1200, Simon Blake wrote:
that was pretty much what I had (sans TXT record), and it certainly is a better thing to do from a "not annoying the other end" point of view, but it still breaks the RFC - postmaster mail still doesn't get through.
You have to break the RFCs no matter what here, not annoying the other end is also an important consideration.
The advantage (that just occured to me :-) of using 127.0.0.1 is that it makes it easier to test my filtering for city.wellington.net.nz, because from the machine the box will still quite cheerfully handle mail for that host.
127.0.0.1 will break and cause problems for some NT centric MTAs and other broken software. Sure it won't affect you, but of the millions of clueless dolts out there, its bound to affect one or ten of them.
It's not a feature of out of the box qmail, that my hurried reading of the docs could see, to drop mail based on destination - you can have a list of badmailfrom's, but not badrcptto's.
Sadly, qmail is fairly deficient in this area (but then again, so was sendmail until recently). I think http://qmail-docs.surfdirect.com.au/docs/qmail-antirelay.html is probably the best you can do.
You can tell a machine that it isn't the mail server for some domain, but mail directed to that machine for that domain will still go through the queue while qmail decides to bounce it, and it was the act of passing through the queue that was killing the box.
In any case, this wasn't spam, just a whole bunch of bounce messages that the remote server (mainly AOL) felt legitimate in forwarding to my overwhelmed server, so standard RBL style filters wouldn't have worked anyway.
I'm really surprised is was killing the machine... qmail in no slouch, then again, you might be running solaris.
<grin> Debian Linux on a dual PPro. Qmail wasn't the problem, it was happy as a pig in mud, it was syslog flogging all the process time.
By default Debian 2 logs most stuff to /var/log/mail.*, change the lines that look like: mail.err /var/log/mail.err to mail.err -/var/log/mail.err The hyphen. will tell syslog not to sync. the file after writes, which sould greatly reduce the load.
I installed DJB's accustamp logger, that fixed the syslog problem immediately.
OK, ignore the above then. -cw --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog