On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 5:22 PM, Wietse Venema <wie...@porcupine.org> wrote:
> Curtis: > > I'm building a spam filtering appliance using Postfix. We will be making > > every effort to reject invalid recipient addresses at SMTP time, but > since > > we will not always be made aware when an email box on a final destination > > server is no longer valid, we'd like to disable all bouncing after SMTP > > time. > > I saw one person suggest disabling the bounce service in > > /etc/master.cf...which does disable bouncing, but the logs now show > > the following error: > > "status=deferred (bounce or trace service failure)" > > > > What is the correct way to disable bounces? > > None. You need to keep the valid recipient list up-to-date. Postfix > does not (and will not, over my dead body) do what you ask for. > > Wietse > We have every intention of keeping our valid recipient lists up-to-date, because we want to reject all email sent to invalid recipients at smtp time. However, since we don't control the remote servers that we filter email for and because we'll be managing thousands of domains and tens of thousands of email addresses, it's possible, that from time to time, that we'll not be made aware of recipients that are no longer valid. In those cases, if we bounce after smtp, postfix is going to start spewing backscatter. I guess the good news is that since we're filtering out most spam, that the likelihood of backscatter is greatly reduced, but I was hoping for total elimination. What I'd prefer to do here is have the bounces held for customer review so that they can realize that they've got an email address that isn't delivering and fix the problem on their end. Curtis
