> dmc> MTA that only delivers to dbmail would be smaller and quicker. Or > dmc> would this be against the SMTP protocal. From a solutions > dmc> provider perspective who really only cares about the people with > dmc> paid accounts on their system, it seems logical to not even > dmc> bounce mail. Partially because I think spamer's can use the > dmc> method to differentiate between real addresses, but also because > dmc> it takes up resources that don't benefit the customer. > > Not bouncing mail that is undeliverable may be a technical violation > of the RFCs, but I'm not so concerned about that. I'm more concerned > about accepting 200 150K virus messages addressed to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > (a non-existant address that might appear on a web page for spam bots > to find), when they can be rejected without as much bandwidth by the > MTA, simply by checking the alias table.
One additional benefit of having the mta check recipient addresses is it keeps the garbage in your mail spool down. We used to avg. 1500-3500 messages in the mail spool generated by spammers sending to non-existent recipients using bogus sender addresses - the message gets bounced but the bounce can't be delivered, so it times out in queue after 5 days. A good deal of delay in delivering legitimate mail was elimitated by using postfix's recipient checking and keeping the mail queue down to almost nothing. > The hardest part is getting Postfix to understand MySQL or Postgres, > which means compiling it... since no distribution I've seen comes with > SQL built into Postfix (Postgres support requires patches available > from another site). FYI Debian has both mysql and pgsql support. Iirc, debian stable just has mysql, but unstable has both (which is what we're running and it works great). -- Jesse Norell jesse (at) kci.net
