[ale] Monitoring outgoing emails on Postfix, filtering incoming bounce back messages

Jay Loden ale at jayloden.com
Mon Jun 25 23:33:27 EDT 2007



Jim Popovitch wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-06-25 at 18:05 -0400, Jay Loden wrote:
>> On a related topic, any better suggestions on how to filter out all
>> these annoying bounce messages?
> 
> Here's how I do it:  Use 2 mail agents, each on their own IP, one for
> acceptance (MX) and the other for outbound (MTA).  Then use iptables to
> only allow inbound (and related) for the MX, and only outbound (and
> related) for the MTA.  Postfix, as an MX, will then queue undeliverable
> emails and you can periodically run postqueue to see what is held back.

Problem is they're not undeliverable emails, someone is just spoofing my email address as the sender on a bunch of spams, so I'm getting hundreds of "unable to deliver message" responses from people's mail servers, e.g. postmaster at example.com or MAILER-DAEMON at example.com

It's frustrating because I don't know what else I can do short of filtering the messages by content. I wish there was a way to set it up so that bounce messages are only delivered if you actually sent a corresponding email in the first place. Stupid forged headers!

-Jay



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