Help Getting Root's email to recipient

[Alexander Dalloz]

Am So, den 17.04.2005 schrieb Claude Jones um 16:32:

> Hope this is not straying too far off subject, but you raise some thoughts. By 
> implication, I guess the fact that my ISP's mail servers are accepting my 
> forwarded sendmails is an indication that their mail servers are 
> mal-configured? I'm doing a fairly simple thing - I run a script every five 
> minutes; it starts up sendmail; it then runs a little script called gotmail 
> which goes out to my hotmail account and forwards, then deletes, all messages 
> in that account; once the hotmail actions are complete, the last command is 
> to stop sendmail. This generates a flood of chron-job mail messages to root 
> which I alias to myself, then use the .forward to send to my regular email 
> account where it's easy to filter and delete them automatically. 

While I do not fully understand what you are doing there with the
script, I think you should spent some efforts to improve the script or
mechanism to not produce the amount of unwanted cronjob messages. Sound
like big nonsense to run a script every 5 minutes which produces a bunch
of error mail messages, then to forward them to a different account
where to silently delete them. Be friendly to your and your internet
partner (ISP et al.) resources.

> Anyway, all this by saying that the messages appear to be coming from 
> root at viewridgeproductions.com to my ISP's mail server, but that's not a 
> registered domain, so no possibility of reverse look-up. So, I'm assuming 
> that ISP's try to resolve addresses of mail that's coming in, and bounce 
> unresolvable addresses, as a safety practice? Do I have this all right? And 
> if they're not doing this, what does it mean if they are permitting mail 
> that's coming from unresolvable addresses....

You are correct, that not accepting mail by unresolvable domain
addresses reduces spam.

http://www.sendmail.org/m4/features.html
  --> 
accept_unresolvable_domains

See how that feature is commented in the sendmail.mc Fedora's Sendmail
is shipping with:

dnl # We strongly recommend not accepting unresolvable domains if you
want to
dnl # protect yourself from spam. However, the laptop and users on
computers
dnl # that do not have 24x7 DNS do need this.
dnl #
dnl FEATURE(`accept_unresolvable_domains')dnl

> Claude Jones

Alexander


-- 
Alexander Dalloz | Enger, Germany | GPG http://pgp.mit.edu 0xB366A773
legal statement: http://www.uni-x.org/legal.html
Fedora Core 2 GNU/Linux on Athlon with kernel 2.6.11-1.14_FC2smp 
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