Valdis Kletnieks <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>Interestingly enough, that host claims to be running Sendmail 8.9.1, which
>indicates that this one was intentionally self-inflicted (as opposed to
>sites running packages that inflict this by vendor choice).

-nod-  It hurts to see people do that...


>What I did was:
>1) Coded up a standard form letter, explaining what they were
>   doing wrong, why it was wrong, and what problems it caused.
>2) If I see one, I send the form letter for the first 2-3 times around.

Yeah, like I said, been there, done that, multiple times to postmaster and
whois(1) domain contacts...it's at this point I would normally add them to
my sendmail(1) access.db.


>3) If they keep doing it, they get added to one of my procmail filters
>so further bounces get dropped on the floor. I've been averaging some
>600+ mail/day the last few weeks, so automation is of the essence.. ;)

Yeah, I rememebr the days of only 600/day ;)  Unfortunately, I don't want
to do the procmail to /dev/null thing (especially as we do try to have a
group to handle postmaster and listserv duties, we need consistancy).

There is an obvious problem with their mailer, and our system even trying
to respond to them is obviously going to fail in those certain cases.
Normally I'd block them in sendmail's access.db with a "friendly" message
identifying the reason they're blocked and a phone contact for when they
correct their problem.  Unfortunately, the fact that listserv can receive
messages out-of-band (with respect to sendmail and SMTP), means that that
method is not guaranteed to be effective.  Also, if that domain is blocked
in access.db, any list users for that domain will get a 500-level SMTP
response when listserv tries to send, and last time I checked it would stop
that list delivery attempt.

*grrr*

If there's no mechanism in listserv itself to block that domain, I guess I
could just do something like:
  o access.db restrict that domain,
  o SET * NOMAIL,NOPOST FOR *@bad.domain.com
which should allow me to restrict them and not have it affect listserv
deliveries.  But...I hate doing certain modifications that affect user's
lists; though this case seems to be in the "system maintainence" type
category which can in some cases be acceptable.  Comments?


-philip

--
Philip Kizer <[log in to unmask]>
Texas A&M CIS Operating Systems Group, Unix