topic Re: configuring catch all in sendmail in Operating System - Linux

configuring catch all in sendmail

kcpant — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 02:11:27 GMT

Hi friends,

first of all, I need a fair advice from you all, is using catch-all account worth now a days? I believe it's not, due to heavy loads of spam coming inside through it.

one of my customer have it's email services hosted by an MSP/ISP, and have a linux server on it's own premises to regularly download incoming mails from hosting server to local server by using fetchmail in daemon mode, on every 2 minutes. now, because for every bunch of new pop IDs to be added to it's domain by MSP, it has to pay an amount to MSP.the customer don't want to pay extra amount now, but wants to use catch-all account for new users, means, he will have some local e-mail IDs which do not have any pop ID on MSP's hosting server, and any mail sent to those IDs from outside will be caught by catch-all account. now, the trouble for me is, how I can configure the local server's sendmail daemon to distribute the incoming mails on catch-all account to the appropriate local user's ID? is this possible or not?

thanks in advance.

Re: configuring catch all in sendmail

Dave Falloon — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 10:34:26 GMT

You could probably write a script that scans the catch all mbox and then splits out messages based on the from address ...

How good are you with perl/python?

You might even be able to use procmail on the incoming messages to split them out to individual users.

Thats a lot of work considering you all ready have a mail server setup. Wouldn't it be easier and cheaper to just reconfigure sendmail change your MX record to your inhouse server and then pay for a backup mail service?

I have used quite a few backup mail services from different vendors, I recommend lanechange.net ( they are canadian and they use qmail which makes them good choices in my books, plus they have been really reliable in the past )

It may save you the headache of lost mail, or strange side effects of a home made solution.

--Dave

Re: configuring catch all in sendmail

Stuart Browne — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 11:32:18 GMT

there are existing routines to do this, infact I think fetchmail has the ability to duplex/multiplex a mailbox.

Re: configuring catch all in sendmail

Steven E. Protter — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 21:44:00 GMT

There are lots of ways to handle this situation. I set up my servers to only accept mal for authorizied id's. This rejects thousands of spam messages with user id not found messages.

this is the better way to go because it gets bad addressed dropped from spam lists.

Critical files:

/etc/mail/access # database of bad addresses
/etc/mail/virtusertable # address database.
/etc/mail/genericstable # address database.

Set this up and run the buildmail script on http://www.hpux.ws

That script builds the sendmail database and teaches you how to use this database to accomplish more.

More info at http://www.sendmail.org

SEP

Re: configuring catch all in sendmail

kcpant — Tue, 17 May 2005 00:53:26 GMT

Hi All,

thanks for reply ( infact, I'm returning to this thread from a long time). BUt I'm not very clear about the process you told me. can anybody tell me in a simpler language how I can distribute the mails recieved on catch-all account to appropriate local user's mailboxes?

thanks in advance.