Need Expert Opinion on Sendmail Crisis (Disk Quota/Bounce Backs)

[Developer8]

Sendmail Crisis:

I sent out a mass mailing using the Unix sendmail utility, with all bounce backs going to /var/spool/mail/username. During this process the mail partition exceeded it's disk quota.

What I need to find out is if an email that was trying to bounce back to me and couldn't get through could end up in someone's email box eventually up to 100 times?!

NOTE:
- During this process, a small number of emails were sent to /var/spool/mqueue

 

[blizz]

Hi,

You could try to wildcard -

Using virtusertable, send all unknown addresses to /dev/null. For example per domain,

/etc/mail/virtusertable
@mycomp.com dev-null
dan@mycomp.com dan
sally@mycomp.com sally

/etc/aliases
dev-null: /dev/null

Create a user account that you will send bulk emails from and bounce backs may not be a problem.





Blizz

http://www.blizzards.info

 

[Developer8]

What is your expert opinion of what would happen if an email that was trying to bounce back to me and couldn't get through (because my bounce back file was full)? Could it end up in someone's email box eventually up to 100 times?

I checked my /var/log/maillog file and it indicates that only one email (with a "sent" status) was sent to the customer who complained of receiving 100 emails.