Jim,
Exactly why do you want/need a catchall account at all? Albeit, while
that is far better than having a REJECT rule for badly addressed
messages, it also creates an ongoing headache of someone having to scan
through tons of messages that you KNOW are most likely SPAM.
First, some background -- you can do 3 things with badly addressed mail
messages in QMail:
- reject them
- send them to a catchall account
- delete them
Personally, all of my servers have a DELETE rule for badly addressed
messages. I just drop them and forget about it.
First, most new admins want to use a REJECT option -- tell users they
got a bad email address. This is the WORST option, however! Because of
address phishing, you will get many times more SPAM than otherwise if
you send REJECT messages. Why? Spammers will send 100,000 messages to
your server addressed to a...@domain.com, a...@domain.com a...@domain.com...
and so forth (usually, it is actually a dictionary/name attack more than
a brute-force attack, but you get the idea). Their goal is to send you
100,000 emails and get only 99,998 bounce messages -- and voila! They
have 2 "good" email addresses they can add to their "list of proven good
addresses" that they sell to other spammers.
Just having a domain that is "searchable" that way will increase your
SPAM attacks many-fold! So accept EVERYTHING (they'll stop phishing when
they realize you NEVER reject a message due to a bad address!)
That leaves 2 options:
- keep the bad messages, or
- just silently delete them
In my book, I delete them. If you WANT to read through hundreds (or
thousands) of messages that are nearly always SPAM, that's your
business... but there are other ways to determine that a badly addressed
message was attempted -- like that the recipient never got it!
===
One last tidbit for security: A lot of us are essentially lazy when it
comes to accounts for email. Consider this: if your email address is
your login ID, then a hacker only needs to know your password to break
in! Consider instead, giving each user a separate mailbox name and
e-mail address:
a...@gunsnroses.com is just the email address... it actually is an
alias (forward in QMT) for the mailbox axyl...@gunsnroses.com. Axyl
needs to know the mailbox name when he sets up his mail clients (or uses
webmail), but other than that, everyone uses axyl@ as the email address.
When an "attacker" wants to break into the mail server for
gunsnroses.com, they can use the name a...@gunsnroses.com until the cows
come back from the moon -- but it'll never work, because that isn't a
valid account.
FWIW: for my corporate accounts, I create a mailbox name (I won't
disclose the formula), and then forwards for the actual user in the form
of: fi...@domain.com, fl...@domain.com, f.l...@domain.com,
firstl...@domain.com, & first.l...@domain.com (although first@ is
sometimes omitted)... then the user can tell their
friends/coworkers/associates any of the aliases that they prefer... and
while all work, none are the login name for the user (nor the mailbox name).
Just food for thought.
Dan McAllister
On 5/19/2014 9:15 AM, Jim Shupert wrote:
Friends,
1st let me say that i have asked this forum for advice on my battele
with spam and I can say that I am enjoying success from the wisdom.
thank you.
a related matter.
I [ the postmaster ] personnally get a lot of spam because I am the
ctach all account.
this means I get spam for ' people who do not exist" - this is 2
catagories.
1- accounts that did exist in the past but no longer. ie billiebob
left - so no billie...@mydom.com anymore
2- accounts that have never existed . ie unic...@mydom.com
as you might suspect these are largely spam.
My q - what is a suggested means of doing this?
my thoughts are
1. a account is made named d...@mydom.com as catch all and assign it a
quota of 5 MB
2 make s...@mydom.com the catch all.
or
3. no change - meaning leave it so it goes to my mailbox as catch all.
thanks
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