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How to stop qmail bounce messages

R

rihad

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How to stop qmail from trying to deliver bounces because of nonexistent local addresses?
 
Thanks, I found it. Strangely, it's already set to "reject" for every domain I checked, but I do get a few hundred "failure notice" emails daily from plesk on my administrative email. And there's no way to cut that off in "Notifications". Plesk 9.2.3.

Example bounce I receive:
Hi. This is the qmail-send program at our.plesk.host.
I tried to deliver a bounce message to this address, but the bounce bounced!

<[email protected]>:
206.190.54.127 failed after I sent the message.
Remote host said: 554 delivery error: dd This user doesn't have a yahoo.com account ([email protected]) [0] - mta1046.mail.re4.yahoo.com

--- Below this line is the original bounce.
...
 
Ok, I ran /opt/psa/admin/sbin/mchk --with-spam, but the failure notice emails are still coming.
 
Anyone, please? Failure notices have neither stopped nor slowed down.
 
I'm running into the same (or at least a similar problem) since I upgraded from 8.X to 9.3. PLESK is installed as the management system for multiple domain hosting on a GoDaddy Virtual Dedicated Server I run. I have low e-mail traffic and never had any problems until I upgraded the PLESK control panel to 9.3.

Almost as soon as I did that, my outbound SMTP got shut down by GoDaddy because I exceeded the limit of 1,000 messages a day. I checked all the SPAM settings (some of which seemed to have been changed by the upgrade) and ensured that every domain was set to reject messages.

That done, I am still getting cut off by GoDaddy. I dug through the mail queue, and see all these messages to and from [email protected] (GoDaddy's name for the system). These look like bounce messages that are then being bounced back and forth, driving up the SMTP count. I can't find any way to suppress these messages - even one post saying they can't be suppressed. Is this the case? Or is there a way I can stop these bounce messages to and from mailman@ip.....?


I saw one post referencing the settings in the /var/qmail/alias directory (.qmail-anonymous, .qmail-mailman, .qmail-postmaster...). They were all set to the default contact PLESK asks for, which is an e-mail address outside the server. I figured setting this to a local address might stop these bounce e-mails from going to GoDaddy's SMTP relay host. I could live with clearing them out of a local ID if it meant GoDaddy would stop shutting down by SMTP service. I tried setting them to anonymous@localhost, but that just seemed to loop the e-mails endlessly. I've now tried setting them to a local ID that I know exists, but I'm not sure whether that's working.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Thanks!
 
Deleting the file /var/qmail/alias/.qmail-mailer-daemon doesn't help: Plesk keeps recreating the file every 15 minutes or so, and there's no visible option to turn that off. What if I *don't* want it around?
 
doublebounceto and alias settings

Working with the GoDaddy virtual hosting systems technical lead (I want to give credit where credit is due - after the runaround I got from other techs, he stepped up to look into this), here's what we did that has taken care of the immediate problem. I think there's more work to be done to make everything work the way I'd want it do, but this has gotten rid of the excessive activity for now.

Create a file named doublebounceto in the /var/qmail/control directory. It should contain simply a "#" on the first line. That will cause qmail to discard doublebounce messages.

Following that example, I did the same to some of the files in the /var/qmail/alias directory, like .qmail-anonymous and .qmail-postmaster. I replaced the entries in the files with a "#" on the first (and only) line of the file. That got rid of some of the other messages I didn't need being delivered and/or forwarded.

I don't claim to understand qmail in detail, nor to have investigated all the implications of these steps. They work for me, for now. Hope this helps.
 
mgreis: I too have a GoDadday VDS and upgraded to Plesk 9.3 and had my 3,000 SMTP relay reached that day and everyday since (about 1-1/2 months). Usually by 5am or so each day. Of course GoDaddy was no help at all. Told me to look into the logs. My problem, not theirs.

So I did what you said:
Create doublebounceto and changed the .qmail-anonymous and .qmail-postmaster files (I only did those two) and from what I can tell it seems to have worked. I don't know if this is a loose work-around but at this point I was ready to leave GoDaddy. I appreciate your input into this topic!

Can you tell me how I can determine the number of emails qmail is sending/relaying in a 24 hour period? Obviously GoDaddy is monitoring this, but how do I check it for myself.
 
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