Squirrelmail - Want to return all emails sent to a certain account.

[timswim78]

I have some webspace with squirrelmail for my email system. I gave my someone a user account, and she did not realize that signing up for promotions, drawings, and etc. would overwhelm her account with email. So, she started getting 30-50 junk emails a day. It seemed like they were impossible to stop, so I gave her a new account and set the limit size on her old account to 1MB. Originally I deleted her old account, but all of the junk-mails got sent to the catch-all account.

Is there a better way of handling this situation? FOr example, can I delete her original account and have all emails sent to it returned to the sender?

 

[Soybomb]

Squirrelmail is the client and really doesn't have much to do with the actual accounts. I don't know what sofware you use, but I'd leave the account setup and set the maildir to /dev/null instead of /home/luser/maildir/ or whatever.

 

[cleverhandle]

Yes, this is the MTA's job - Sendmail, Postfix, whatever... Squirrelmail is just the frontend to the mailboxes.

 

[timswim78]

Thank you for the advice, but I have to admit that it was a little over my head. The software that I use for the administration of my account is Ensim Site Administrator 3.1.10-1. There is a section for called SMTP Sendmail with some options, but I am not sure what option to adjust.

Originally posted by: Soybomb
Squirrelmail is the client and really doesn't have much to do with the actual accounts. I don't know what sofware you use, but I'd leave the account setup and set the maildir to /dev/null instead of /home/luser/maildir/ or whatever.

 

[Soybomb]

I'm not familiar with the front end packages like that, does it provide you an option to choose where the users email is stored on disk?

 

[cleverhandle]

Soybomb - while you could alias or link the Maildir to /dev/null, the right way to do this (in Sendmail, at least) is with the access database.

With shell access and full control of Sendmail, you'd add a line

To: oldaccount@mydomain.com REJECT

to /etc/mail/access, and run makemap hash access < access inside /etc/mail. Since it sounds like this is a shared machine, and you don't have full control over the setup (not all sendmails even use the access db by default), I'd recommend calling your host for support. They should be able to tell you what changes can be made that will fit the configuration properly.

edit: forgot the "REJECT" - that's the whole point, eh?

 

[timswim78]

No, I do not have that option.
When you mentioned the directories in your previous post, are these things that I would adjust by logging in with FTP and renaming directories, or is there a file somewhere that needs to be edited?

Originally posted by: Soybomb
I'm not familiar with the front end packages like that, does it provide you an option to choose where the users email is stored on disk?

 

[Soybomb]

cleverhandle, didn't know that, I'm not much of a sendmail guy Its not a situation I've encontered but just the first thing I thought of that I'd do with my postfix entries to remedy the problem. What problems would doing that provide for sendmail? Perhaps its something to keep in mind if I ever do encounter it

timswim, I think cleverhandle has the right idea and it might be best to mail your host and see how they recommend you handle in the way they're setup. Would there be a difference to setting the size limit on that account particularly small and just letting it full it and ignoring it since its just junk anyway? If the address isn't going to be used but can't be deleted because of a catchall in place, does a full box taking up little space differ much from an empty box that no one checks anyway?

 

[cleverhandle]

Originally posted by: Soybomb
What problems would doing that provide for sendmail? Perhaps its something to keep in mind if I ever do encounter it

Not a problem for sendmail per se, just that if you alias the mailbox you'll still be accepting the mail and no one will know the address is bad. Even if you don't care to let people know that, you'll still spend time processing the message that you don't need to.

 

[timswim78]

This is what I ended up doing:

Under my sendmail options there is a SPAM filter that allows you to block emails from an email address, an IP Range, or a domain. At the suggestion of another user, I deleted the account that I wanted to kill, and I entered that email address into the spam filter. Now, any email sent to that address is returned to the user!