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Re: default destination in exim?



On 2004-02-18, Vineet Kumar penned:
>
>> When I do this, all mail to any user on the system gets sent to that
>> account, not just mail to non-existent users.  Eek!
>
> This is because the system_aliases director comes before localuser.
> Directors are searched in order.  If you only want a particular director
> to be used for addresses that fail all other tests, you
> want to add a new director at the end of the list.  

Ahah!  That was the key detail I was missing.
Inexcusable, actually, as the section does begin with "ORDER DOES
MATTER" and a mini version of what you've just typed.


> Then, since all this
> director needs to do is send all mail to a new address, there's no need
> for it to lsearch an alias file, just use smartuser and new_address.
> The additional alias file can be useful if in case you want to have a
> bit more control over the wildcard, though.  For example, you could
> selectively block/drop certain addresses:
>
> # at the end of the directors configuration section
> catchall:
>   driver = aliasfile
>   file_transport = address_file
>   pipe_transport = address_pipe
>   file = /etc/wild_aliases
>   search_type = lsearch*

I would ask about this whole search/lsearch/* business, but I'm getting
the feeling that I've been far too lazy about reading the docs, so I'll
make that a project for myself.

>
>
> Then in /etc/wild_aliases, you have *:monique (to deliver all mail to
> monique), but you can also include things like this:
>
> myh-lotsospam: :unknown:
> myh-exboyfriend: :blackhole:
> myh-foo: :fail:

Heh.  I like these examples =)  Is there a :pit of doom: option for the
exboyfriend alias?  Say, in addition to rejecting the message, it also
sends missiles to the sender's house?

Hypothetically speaking, of course ...

> unknown and fail are almost the same in this case, since this is the
> last director, there are no more to pass on to, so unknown results in a
> failure.  The message might be different though (something like "no such
> user" vs. "administratively prohibited, forced failure") but you'd have
> to test that; I'm not absolutely sure.  Actually, that caveat goes for
> this whole message; I haven't used exim3 in a long, long time!  I
> recommend Andreas' exim4 backport packages.  Actually, no, you said
> you're using unstable; just grab exim4 from there.

Yeah, that's on my to do list ... sort of.  exim 3 is working, and I'm a
bit scared of screwing everything up when I move to exim 4.

> Oh yeah, btw, in case it's not obvious: the wild_aliases example
> addresses I gave are local parts of recipient addresses, just like a
> regular alias file.  It's good if you have certain addresses that get
> nothing but spam.  This will help you manage the noise a bit.
>

Thank you *so* much for this little tutorial.  It's actually getting me
to think that there might actually be some order in the chaos that is
my exim configuration.  Maybe, one of these days, I'll actually
understand how it works =)

-- 
monique



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