From: Alex on
Hi,

I have a system with some user accounts and is the final destination
for a few domains. Some of these users forward email off the system to
another system, such as yahoo or gmail. The problem I'm having is when
a user is forwarding their email to an expired yahoo account, for
example, and how to manage the bounces.

In particular, some mail is received from an "unattended mailbox" that
doesn't accept bounces, so they sit in our queue until they expire and
are purged. What is the proper way to handle this? Should I be
rewriting something in the headers so it takes my system out of the
loop and leaves it to yahoo and the sender to work out, or is the
proper solution what I'm currently doing (leaving them until they
expire)?

Thanks,
Alex

From: Victor Duchovni on
On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 10:19:03PM -0400, Alex wrote:

> I have a system with some user accounts and is the final destination
> for a few domains. Some of these users forward email off the system to
> another system, such as yahoo or gmail. The problem I'm having is when
> a user is forwarding their email to an expired yahoo account, for
> example, and how to manage the bounces.

Disable forwarding after a mailbox is observed to be consistently
unreachable for a while.

> In particular, some mail is received from an "unattended mailbox" that
> doesn't accept bounces, so they sit in our queue until they expire and
> are purged. What is the proper way to handle this?

Just disable forwarding when it is futile. The volume of bounces will be
low if you don't let the number of such forwarding configurations grow
without bound.

--
Viktor.

P.S. Morgan Stanley is looking for a New York City based, Senior Unix
system/email administrator to architect and sustain our perimeter email
environment. If you are interested, please drop me a note.