Hi all,

I am new to sendmail and have a mailserver using sendmail 8.14.2 with
cyrus 2.3. Due to the number of valid mail messages that are received
mis-addressed, I would like to receive all mail for bad addresses to a
catchall mailbox for review rather than bounce them. The documentation
and postings specify the use of:
define(`LUSER_RELAY',`local:someuser@your.domain')
for this purpose. I added
define(`LUSER_RELAY',`local:catchall@mail.domain.i nt')
but I have not been able to get it to work. (I also remade the cf file
and restarted sendmail of course.)

I don't know if any of features implemented have any effect on the
LUSER_RELAY behaviour, but the following may be relavent:
- All accounts are in cyrus SASL
- No mail users have logon accounts on the server.
- The catchall user and mailbox have been created with cyrus and can
receive mail when addressed to it
- The mail server is in an internal domain behind a firewall
- masquerade_as is specified as the public domain with
allmasquerade and masquerade_envelope features specified
- relay_domain clauses are specified for both the internal and public
domains
- local-host-names lists the internal and public domain names with and
without the hosts specified

This will obviously let a lot of trash into the system. So, as part of
the project, I would also like to redirect all messages marked as spam by
SpamAssassin to a separate mailbox and anything identified by MIMEDefang
as containing a virus to a third mailbox.

But first,

From this, can anyone tell me what I have done wrong and how to make the
LUSER_RELAY function?

TIA

J.J.
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In article <Xns9A698A7CC1125dayjayjgmailcom@38.119.100.119> ,
"J.J. Day" <NOSPAM..Day.jayJ@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I am new to sendmail and have a mailserver using sendmail 8.14.2 with
> cyrus 2.3. Due to the number of valid mail messages that are received
> mis-addressed, I would like to receive all mail for bad addresses to a
> catchall mailbox for review rather than bounce them.

Is that a reality-based motivation? Have you looked at the overall
picture quantitatively and found that you really have enough legitimate
mail with misspelled user names to matter and little enough
randomly-addressed spam that anyone could hope to find the legitimate
mail in that sewer?

For all of the domains that I've worked with over the past few years,
even ones with just a handful of real users, the spam targeting
non-existent users has numbered in the hundreds per day and up, with
'up' reaching millions per day for a couple of domains that are
associated with prominent brand names. In no case that I've seen in
recent years has it made sense to do what you're talking about, because
it takes a human to figure out which of the messages in the junk box are
in fact worth looking at. If you don't have someone doing that
diligently, looking at all of the messages every day, you are doing a
*worse* job of informing legitimate senders about their typos than if
you reject attempts to mail non-existent recipient addresses. The worst
possible approach is to use Cyrus and Sendmail in their default setup,
where you accept mail for all users in Sendmail and pass it to Cyrus,
which then generates a bounce that you have to try to deliver, because
then you be handling a lot of bounces aimed at people whose addresses
were forged on spam...


> The documentation
> and postings specify the use of:
> define(`LUSER_RELAY',`local:someuser@your.domain')
> for this purpose. I added
> define(`LUSER_RELAY',`local:catchall@mail.domain.i nt')
> but I have not been able to get it to work. (I also remade the cf file
> and restarted sendmail of course.)
>
> I don't know if any of features implemented have any effect on the
> LUSER_RELAY behaviour, but the following may be relavent:
> - All accounts are in cyrus SASL

SASL is about SMTP authentication for senders, not routing of recipient
addresses.

> - No mail users have logon accounts on the server.

That's a critical clue.

If you use Cyrus and strictly 'virtual' users, Sendmail does not know
which user addresses exist and which do not. There are ways to make that
information known to Sendmail, but since you have not mentioned using
any of them, I assume that you have the standard setup, which means that
you generate a lot of harmful 'backscatter' bounces. That can be
adequate reason to set up a catchall in Cyrus that you just empty
regularly without any rationale about finding the sender typos.

> - The catchall user and mailbox have been created with cyrus and can
> receive mail when addressed to it

Then you probably need to figure out how to make *Cyrus* use it as a
catchall. Sendmail has no way to know that an address it routes to Cyrus
isn't valid, so to get this to work you need to make *Cyrus* handle the
catchall.

--
Now where did I hide that website...

Bill Cole <bill@scconsult.com> wrote in news:bill-E297F6.11462123032008
@news.det.sbcglobal.net:

> In article <Xns9A698A7CC1125dayjayjgmailcom@38.119.100.119> ,
> "J.J. Day" <NOSPAM..Day.jayJ@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I am new to sendmail and have a mailserver using sendmail 8.14.2
>> with cyrus 2.3. Due to the number of valid mail messages that are
>> received mis-addressed, I would like to receive all mail for bad
>> addresses to a catchall mailbox for review rather than bounce them.
>
> Is that a reality-based motivation?

Yes

>
>> The documentation and postings specify the use of:
>> define(`LUSER_RELAY',`local:someuser@your.domain')
>> for this purpose. I added
>> define(`LUSER_RELAY',`local:catchall@mail.domain.i nt')
>> but I have not been able to get it to work. (
>>
>> I don't know if any of features implemented have any effect on the
>> LUSER_RELAY behaviour, but the following may be relavent:
>
>> - No mail users have logon accounts on the server.
>
> That's a critical clue.
>
> If you use Cyrus and strictly 'virtual' users, Sendmail does not know
> which user addresses exist and which do not. There are ways to make
> that information known to Sendmail,

How can I do that?

> but since you have not mentioned
> using any of them, I assume that you have the standard setup, which
> means that you generate a lot of harmful 'backscatter' bounces.

From reading the documentation, I think the setup is standard. This is
the bounce message for an email received from an external source. It
appears to come from sendmail as part of the smtp dialogue rather than
from cyrus after the message has been accepted. The masquerade has been
removed but the LUSER_RELAY has not been applied - shouldn't that be
done as soon as the "550-Mailbox unknown" determination is made?
----- Transcript of session follows -----
.... while talking to localhost:
>>> STARTTLS dialogue
<<< 500 5.5.2 Syntax error
>>> DATA
<<< 550-Mailbox unknown. Either there is no mailbox associated with
this
<<< 550-name or you do not have authorization to see it.
<<< 550 5.1.1 User unknown
550 5.1.1 <badusername@public.org>... User unknown
<<< 503 5.5.1 No recipients

Final-Recipient: RFC822; badusername@public.org
X-Actual-Recipient: RFC822; badusername@mail.domain.int
Action: failed
Status: 5.1.1
Diagnostic-Code: SMTP; 550-Mailbox unknown. Either there is no mailbox
associated with this
Last-Attempt-Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2008 10:30:56 -0600 (MDT)

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Subject: Re: Mail sorting question
From: "J.J. Day" <NOSPAM..Day.jayJ@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail

Bill Cole <bill@scconsult.com> wrote in news:bill-E297F6.11462123032008
@news.det.sbcglobal.net:

> In article <Xns9A698A7CC1125dayjayjgmailcom@38.119.100.119> ,
> "J.J. Day" <NOSPAM..Day.jayJ@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I am new to sendmail and have a mailserver using sendmail 8.14.2
>> with cyrus 2.3. Due to the number of valid mail messages that are
>> received mis-addressed, I would like to receive all mail for bad
>> addresses to a catchall mailbox for review rather than bounce them.
>
> Is that a reality-based motivation?

Yes

>
>> The documentation and postings specify the use of:
>> define(`LUSER_RELAY',`local:someuser@your.domain')
>> for this purpose. I added
>> define(`LUSER_RELAY',`local:catchall@mail.domain.i nt')
>> but I have not been able to get it to work. (
>>
>> I don't know if any of features implemented have any effect on the
>> LUSER_RELAY behaviour, but the following may be relavent:
>
>> - No mail users have logon accounts on the server.
>
> That's a critical clue.
>
> If you use Cyrus and strictly 'virtual' users, Sendmail does not know
> which user addresses exist and which do not. There are ways to make
> that information known to Sendmail,

How can I do that?

After looking at the output of:
sendmail -v baduser@mail.internal.int <test

>>> MAIL From:<root@sys1.internal.int> SIZE=566
250 2.1.0 <root@sys1.internal.int>... Sender ok
>>> RCPT To:<baduser@mail.internal.int>
>>> DATA
250 2.1.5 <baduser@mail.internal.int>... Recipient ok
354 Enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself
>>> .
250 2.0.0 m2NMWVJg089259 Message accepted for delivery
baduser@mail.internal.int... Sent (m2NMWVJg089259 Message
accepted for delivery)

it is obvious that Sendmail doesn't know that the user is invalid. So, if
there is a way for Cyrus to pass its mailbox list to Sendmail, that would
seem the missing part to make LUSER_RELAY operate.

> but since you have not mentioned
> using any of them, I assume that you have the standard setup,

From reading the documentation, I think the setup is standard.


JJ
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"J.J. Day" <NOSPAM..Day.j...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I am new to sendmail and have a mailserver using sendmail 8.14.2 with
> cyrus 2.3.
> Due to the number of valid mail messages that are received
> mis-addressed, I would like to receive all mail for bad addresses to a
> catchall mailbox for review rather than bounce them. The documentation
> and postings specify the use of:
> define(`LUSER_RELAY',`local:someu...@your.domain')
> for this purpose. I added
> define(`LUSER_RELAY',`local:catch...@mail.domain.i nt')
> but I have not been able to get it to work. (I also remade the cf file
> and restarted sendmail of course.)
>
> I don't know if any of features implemented have any effect on the
> LUSER_RELAY behaviour, but the following may be relavent:
> - All accounts are in cyrus SASL
> - No mail users have logon accounts on the server.
> - The catchall user and mailbox have been created with cyrus and can
> receive mail when addressed to it
> - The mail server is in an internal domain behind a firewall
> - masquerade_as is specified as the public domain with
> allmasquerade and masquerade_envelope features specified
> - relay_domain clauses are specified for both the internal and public
> domains
> - local-host-names lists the internal and public domain names with and
> without the hosts specified
>
> This will obviously let a lot of trash into the system. So, as part of
> the project, I would also like to redirect all messages marked as spam by
> SpamAssassin to a separate mailbox and anything identified by MIMEDefang
> as containing a virus to a third mailbox.
>
> But first,
>
> From this, can anyone tell me what I have done wrong and how to make the
> LUSER_RELAY function?

Which method of cyrus & sendmail integration do you use in sendmail.cf?

Standard implementation of LUSER_RELAY in sendmail.cf has been designed
for "OS accounts based local mailer" - achieving similar functionality
for "OS account less" mailbox system requires some "tweaking".

You can easily modify RTCyrus available at
http://open-sendmail.sourceforge.net/ to get
LUSER_RELAY functionality - in FEATURE(`anfi/vcyrus') replace error
mailer for "user unknown" with selecting specific cyrus mailbox.

--
[pl>en: Andrew] Andrzej Adam Filip : anfi@priv.onet.pl : anfi@xl.wp.pl
Open-Sendmail: http://open-sendmail.sourceforge.net/
Business is a good game -- lots of competition and minimum of rules.
You keep score with money.
-- Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari

In article <Xns9A6AAC6BA1032dayjayjgmailcom@38.119.100.119> ,
"J.J. Day" <NOSPAM..Day.jayJ@gmail.com> wrote:

> Subject: Re: Mail sorting question
> From: "J.J. Day" <NOSPAM..Day.jayJ@gmail.com>
> Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
>
> Bill Cole <bill@scconsult.com> wrote in news:bill-E297F6.11462123032008
> @news.det.sbcglobal.net:
>
> > In article <Xns9A698A7CC1125dayjayjgmailcom@38.119.100.119> ,
> > "J.J. Day" <NOSPAM..Day.jayJ@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Hi all,
> >>
> >> I am new to sendmail and have a mailserver using sendmail 8.14.2
> >> with cyrus 2.3. Due to the number of valid mail messages that are
> >> received mis-addressed, I would like to receive all mail for bad
> >> addresses to a catchall mailbox for review rather than bounce them.
> >
> > Is that a reality-based motivation?
>
> Yes
>
> >
> >> The documentation and postings specify the use of:
> >> define(`LUSER_RELAY',`local:someuser@your.domain')
> >> for this purpose. I added
> >> define(`LUSER_RELAY',`local:catchall@mail.domain.i nt')
> >> but I have not been able to get it to work. (
> >>
> >> I don't know if any of features implemented have any effect on the
> >> LUSER_RELAY behaviour, but the following may be relavent:
> >
> >> - No mail users have logon accounts on the server.
> >
> > That's a critical clue.
> >
> > If you use Cyrus and strictly 'virtual' users, Sendmail does not know
> > which user addresses exist and which do not. There are ways to make
> > that information known to Sendmail,
>
> How can I do that?

There are multiple options:

1. Sendmail can use a mailertable with full addresses as keys, and you
could build that table from a list of valid users, routing them to
Cyrus, with a default entry routed to the 'error' mailer.

2. Sendmail has an access map. You could use it to allow relay to Cyrus
for all valid addresses and default the rest of the domain to reject.

3. There is a set of sendmail.cf rules packaged as
'RTCyrus' available via http://open-sendmail.sourceforge.net/ which is
supposed to check with Cyrus directly.

I have not worked with Cyrus recently so I can't vouch for #1 or #3 and
know that #2 was a pain to maintain many years ago.

--
Now where did I hide that website...