Lewis Butler wrote:
On Mar 19, 2004, at 3:22 PM, Elliot Wilen wrote:
My organization runs two SIMS servers--one is a primary mail server; the second is purely a secondary mx (located in another city). The addition of the secondary mx is relatively recent and led to an unforeseen problem.
Not unforeseen. Unless your mail server is likely to be off-line for 4 days or more you should seriously consider not running a backup mx. It is simply spammer bait.
Since the backup mx uses the same blacklists and runs on what would otherwise be an idle machine, it at least has the benefit of offloading some of the spam handling. (Yes, I have been hit with a large amount of spam which is sent to the backup mx in preference to the primary. Also, for some reason, a certain mailserver at Stanford also is (was?) sending through the secondary.)
Anyway, the decision to have a backup mx has been made for various reasons that I shouldn't go into here.
Also, while this isn't relevant to my configuration, how would you deal with this interaction if your backup mx didn't categorically reject multihop relays? It seems you couldn't safely put the backup mx into your clients list; instead you would have to create an "Unknown" account with a custom auto-reply. Would that be an appropriate technique?
Creating an Unknown account is never an appropriate technique. Sometimes clients want it, but I explain to them that I will not be able to do anything to stem the overwhelming flood of spam they will receive. Sometimes that convinces them to catch a clue, sometimes not.
What I envisioned was an Unknown account set to discard all mail--but which would have an Autoreply which would be worded in such a way as to provide adequate information for legitimate bounces. But now that I think about it a little more, it would be terrible idea. Since the return address on the autoreply would NOT be [EMAIL PROTECTED], it would end up causing a bunch of mail loops.
Anyway, thanks again for your help.
--Elliot Wilen
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