Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Postfix: Handling bounced email where both From: and To: addresses are illegitimate?

We have two Postfix mailservers in a University environment. There are thousands of servers managed by a dozen different groups, and I do not control all of the hosts. These servers use my mailservers for routing email, either as a Smarthost or using MX records.



Several servers are continuously sending email where the from address is like:



cfengine@host.example.org



These emails are sent to an invalid address, and thus bounce. But since the "From:" address is also invalid, the emails are stuck in an endless bounce loop for several days.



If I list the postfix queue with postqueue -p shows me hundreds of messages like the following:



ABCD7301713E     3799 Tue Mar  5 05:20:35  MAILER-DAEMON
(delivery temporarily suspended: connect to host.example.org[192.168.100.100]:25: Connection refused)
cfengine@host.example.org




  1. Using Postfix on the mailservers, is it possible to rewrite either the "From:" address or the "To:" address in these emails? I would like to direct them to the system owners and request that they clean up their systems.

  2. Can I notify Postmaster about these bounces? Postmaster can then notify the system owners.

No comments:

Post a Comment

linux - How to SSH to ec2 instance in VPC private subnet via NAT server

I have created a VPC in aws with a public subnet and a private subnet. The private subnet does not have direct access to external network. S...