Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Security and Technology : Stop exim bounce messages

[Ivanner]

Hi,
I am running exim on WHM 10.8.0 /cPanel 10.8.2-R119.
I have a long queue in Exim, where most of those emails are "Mailbox is full", "retry timeout exceeded", etc, bounces sent to the sender.

I want to stop the bounces from happening.
I thought that an ACL rule might do this, but I am not sure how to do it.

Anyone has been able to do this?

[blockcipher]

I would also be interested in this. I usually have around 300-600 of these.

Thanks!

[SPaReK]

The easiest solution would be to investigate the root cause of the problem.

A mailbox is full message usually means that a particular mail account is over its quota limit. I am not entirely sure why everyone believes mailbox quotas are necessary. But if a mail account is at its mailbox quota limit, then its likely that mailbox is not being checked and can be removed.

The retry timeout exceeded message can be many different things. Among the more common causes for this error message is that the overall account is at or over its quota (the entire account, not just a mailbox). You should investigate why the account is over its quota and what can be done to guard against that.

[tweakservers]

Check the option "Discard emails for users who have exceeded their quota instead of keeping them in the queue." in WHM > Exim Configuration Editor so that if there is a user mail box is full, the bounce will be discarded by your server.

[SPaReK]

Originally Posted by tweakservers

Check the option "Discard emails for users who have exceeded their quota instead of keeping them in the queue." in WHM > Exim Configuration Editor so that if there is a user mail box is full, the bounce will be discarded by your server.

The way I understand this option, this only works in regards to an account's overall quota and not individual mailbox quota. Secondly, all this option does is prevents messages intended for accounts that are over their quota from being stored in the mail queue. Typically, a spammer will send a message and not use a valid return address. When this message reaches the server and the above option is enabled, the message is not attempted to be delivered, and a message back to the sender is created telling the sender that the account is over its quota. If the return address on the message is invalid, then you are stuck with a bounce message in your mail queue trying to be sent to an address that does not exist. This I believe is what the original poster is referring to.

My solution would be to disabled mailbox quotas or atleast set the quotas to unlimited for mailboxes that have reached their quotas. This is why I'm not entirely sure what the point of a mailbox quota system is. You are either checking a mailbox or you are not.

If an overall account is over its quota, make sure its default box is set to :fail: and then disable all mail accounts on the account, so that messages for the domain are immediately rejected.

[Dacsoft]

While it won't stop them, this little script will remove them.

#!/bin/bash -
# remove_null_sender.sh
# Removes queued mail with a null ( <> ) sender

mailq () {
        exiqgrep -b
}

for line in `mailq |awk '{print$1 " " $3}' | grep '<>' | awk '{print$1}'`; do /usr/sbin/exim -Mrm $line; done