Re: Are people trying to relay mail through my system?
On 9/25/23 14:58, Rick Macdonald wrote:
Some of
the mail in the queue is up to 4 days old. I'm going to clear it
all out to see what new arrives in this state.
I've made a bit of progress.
First, I deleted the almost 6000 messages in the mail queue:
# mailq | grep 1q | cut -c11-26 | xargs exim4 -Mrm
Then I noticed that I was still getting more, but always the same 4
messages. I checked on the Dreamhost server where I pull my mail
from and sure enough found those 4 messages "stuck" there. I deleted
the 4 from Dreamhost, and now all is quiet for the moment.
These 4 messages were all spam. I think the mail in the "mailq" kept
growing because fetchmail was repeatedly trying but failing to
retrieve the same messages over and over.
I see a fetchmail option that might help, but I'm wondering if I
might then lose some non-spam problematic mail that fetchmail can't
fetch?
- --nosoftbounce
- (since v6.3.10, Keyword: set no softbounce, since v6.3.10)
Hard bounce mode. All permanent delivery errors cause messages
to be deleted from the upstream server, see "no softbounce"
below.
- --softbounce
- (since v6.3.10, Keyword: set softbounce, since v6.3.10)
Soft bounce mode. All permanent delivery errors cause messages
to be left on the upstream server if the protocol supports
that. Default to match historic
fetchmail documentation, to be changed to hard bounce mode in
the next fetchmail release.
I'm running fetchmail v6.4.37. It appears that --softbounce is still
the default. Since they intend to change the default someday to
--nosoftbounce, maybe this option isn't as dangerous as it sounds to
me?
Lastly, do I understand correctly that the root of this whole issue
is simply misformed headers in the original spam mail that I receive
at my Dreamhost account? Oh, and does all this lead to the "Frozen
Message" emails I receive (described in a prior email)?
Rick
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