Suggestions solicited-Mail Situation
Terry Knab
Nyx's mail spool file (where we all have our email) filled up earlier
today. I went to the directory and did a purge of the largest files
(which freed up half the drive).
The main folks who lost email were unvalidated users. Now, I am trying to
figure out a way to prevent me from having to do this again.
So, I propose the following:
If you're unvalidated, your email somehow gets bounced.
Suggestions, thoughts, Mr. Pibb?
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Terry E. Knab
News Administrator
Nyx Public Access Unix
Annette M. Stroud
>
>Nyx's mail spool file (where we all have our email) filled up earlier
>today. I went to the directory and did a purge of the largest files
>(which freed up half the drive).
>
>The main folks who lost email were unvalidated users. Now, I am trying to
>figure out a way to prevent me from having to do this again.
>
>So, I propose the following:
>
>If you're unvalidated, your email somehow gets bounced.
>
>Suggestions, thoughts, Mr. Pibb?
Unvalidated users can't read their mail, n'est-ce pas? Better to bounce
it. I think when I was unvalidated and there was that tantalizing new
mail message every time I logged on, it turned out to be a welcoming
message. Which message ought to be trigged by validation if you are going
to bounce unvalidated user mail.
Annette
Gary Heston
>Nyx's mail spool file (where we all have our email) filled up earlier
>today. I went to the directory and did a purge of the largest files
>(which freed up half the drive).
>The main folks who lost email were unvalidated users. Now, I am trying to
>figure out a way to prevent me from having to do this again.
>So, I propose the following:
>If you're unvalidated, your email somehow gets bounced.
>Suggestions, thoughts, Mr. Pibb?
If you can easily generate a list of unvalidated user IDs, run a script
nightly that overwrites their mailbox with the welcoming message. That
way, they're always seeing the "new mail" notice when they log in, but
there is no problem with excessive size.
I'd suspect that most of the mail was spam, anyway; anyone who gives out
an address that they can read the mail at doesn't care much about that
mail or is clueless, so I imagine the addresses were harvested from Nyx.
Bouncing spam is futile, the bounce message just comes back.
This would also be much easier to do than filter all mail against the
unvalidated user list, as well as consuming far less system resources.
Gary
--
Gary Heston ghe...@nyx.nyx.net Disclaimer, datclaimer...
Windows: User friendly, admin hostile, reliability challenged.
Brett Frankenberger
>
>So, I propose the following:
>
>If you're unvalidated, your email somehow gets bounced.
Putting "/dev/null" in the .forward if unvalidated users should make
their mail disappear. If you want it to bounce, a procmail script
would probably be the best way -- put "/path/to/procmail
/path/to/scriptfile" in .forward and then have a standard script for
all unvalidated users that returns an appropriate bounce message.
Then just make the account creation programs copy a .forward to the
unvalidated user, and make the validation programs remove the .forward.
-- Brett
anon...@blackhole.nyx.net
suspect the reason the bulk of the E-mail was for unvalidated user is,
they didn't get revalidated and the mailing lists they were on continued
carry them. With some lists the spool would be filled in a day.
When revalidation was discussed was this ever one of the topics?
Terry Knab <tk...@nyx.net> wrote:
% Nyx's mail spool file (where we all have our email) filled up earlier
% today. I went to the directory and did a purge of the largest files
% (which freed up half the drive).
% The main folks who lost email were unvalidated users. Now, I am trying to
% figure out a way to prevent me from having to do this again.
% So, I propose the following:
% If you're unvalidated, your email somehow gets bounced.
% Suggestions, thoughts, Mr. Pibb?
% --
% -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
% Terry E. Knab
% News Administrator
% Nyx Public Access Unix
--
anon...@blackhole.nyx.net
To send E-mail delete the blackhole.
Paul Gilmartin
> their mail disappear. If you want it to bounce, a procmail script
> would probably be the best way -- put "/path/to/procmail
> /path/to/scriptfile" in .forward and then have a standard script for
> all unvalidated users that returns an appropriate bounce message.
Even simpler, put a bogus account ("not-for-mail" is a convention
used by NNTP) in .forward. Let sendmail take its course bouncing.
> Then just make the account creation programs copy a .forward to the
> unvalidated user, and make the validation programs remove the .forward.
Sounds good.
-- gil
Darlene Cypser
>I'd suspect that most of the mail was spam, anyway; anyone who gives out
>an address that they can read the mail at doesn't care much about that
>mail or is clueless, so I imagine the addresses were harvested from Nyx.
>Bouncing spam is futile, the bounce message just comes back.
I think Gary is correct. It is probably just spam. Surely you all have
seen when spam comes in with strings of Nyx accounts in alphabetical
order? If Nyx bounces it, that's one cycle but if it bounces back because
it is spam with a bad address we could end up with a bunch of endless mail
loops that would surely crash the system.
Sending the mail of unvalidated users to /dev/null is probably the least
resource intensive solution. All it would take is a .forward file in the
default setup.
--
,___, ,___,
(o o) Darlene Cypser dcy...@nyx.net (o o)
/))^_) Secretary/Treasurer http://www.nyx.net (_^((\
// " " Nyx Net = Public Internet Access " " \\
Darlene Cypser
>suspect the reason the bulk of the E-mail was for unvalidated user is,
>they didn't get revalidated and the mailing lists they were on continued
>carry them. With some lists the spool would be filled in a day.
Maybe, but lot of "never validated" accounts fill up with mail and those
outnumber the "not revalidated". (An admin can tell one from the other.)
There were also a bunch of "misplaced" mail directories that used to fill
up. Those were mail spool entries of no-longer-existing accounts never
purged in aburt's user directory purges. I think Terry removed all those
earlier this year.
>When revalidation was discussed was this ever one of the topics?
Nope.
howard eisenberger
Gary Heston <ghe...@nyx10.nyx.net> wrote:
>In article <93634864...@super.ccp.com>, Terry Knab <tk...@nyx.net> wrote:
>
>
>an address that they can read the mail at doesn't care much about that
>mail or is clueless, so I imagine the addresses were harvested from Nyx.
>Bouncing spam is futile, the bounce message just comes back.
I'm no expert, but isn't it better to block spam rather than
bounce it. Likewise, isn't mail sent to an invalid address
rejected before it gets sent or relayed? Is there someway to
alias unvalidated addresses to an invalid address?
Of course, I may be wrong about this.
Howard E.
Killans - First And Last And Always
<anon...@blackhole.nyx.net> wrote:
>I think if user are unvalidated their mail should hit the bit bucket. I
>they didn't get revalidated and the mailing lists they were on continued
>carry them. With some lists the spool would be filled in a day.
Would this also be true for people who become unintentionally unvalidated
(by not using their account for a month, or whatever)? I use my Nyx email
address as a "safe" forwarding address, so that I don't have to give out
my home email address. It'd be a bit of a pain if, for some reason, I got
myself unvalidated and lost all my email, especially if it wasn't
bounced.
OTOH, that means I get quite a bit of email coming to my nyx address,
so it might turn into one of those problematic spool-hogging accounts and
*deserve* to be deleted...
Mike
--
Mike Collins
mcol...@nyx.net