Well... It Finally Happened... $&#%!

[Vin DSL]

I can't access my mails, e.g. spam.

I can't even delete it from the server! IMAP is crashing...

• 

Hrm...

[Vin DSL]

Bah! That does it!

I had 4781 pages of mails to delete. When I tried to purge them, IMAP kept crapping out. So...

I deleted the account and made a 'new' one. No sooner had I made a 'new' account and checked it, there were another 16 more mails sitting there.

I'm doing the :fail: thingie...

[Connie]

Originally posted by Vin DSL
Bah! That does it!

I had 4781 pages of mails to delete. When I tried to purge them, IMAP kept crapping out. So...

I deleted the account and made a 'new' one. No sooner had I made a 'new' account and checked it, there were another 16 more mails sitting there.

I'm doing the :fail: thingie...

You should have done that along time ago IMO.

[Vin DSL]

Oh, $&#%!!

I can't do that either. I NEED some catch-all accounts.

Okay, Plan-B...

I looked at another account that gets fired at pretty regularly. It had 98MB of spam sitting in it. IMAP handled that just fine - 801 pages - 12,010 mails.

I went back and redid things. I limited those accounts to 100MB each, just like Yahoo and Lycos does these days. That should work!

[lokki]

That's very generous, Vin. I choke mine down to 10M

[Vin DSL]

100MB will keep those accounts going for a week or so. And, if I get busy and forget to check them, at least I won't get 'locked out', you know?

LoL! This is getting absurd! Out of 12,010 mails, there were 4 that I actually read. All the rest were spam.

The other account, the one with 417MB, had 71,000+ mails. Using the same ratio would indicate I probably lost 23 real mails...

[digitalcrease]

What again does the :fail: thing do?

[Vin DSL]

There is a place in cPanel that allows you to forward UCE's to a catchall account[s]. For instance, you could make a catchall account called 'junkmail@yourdomain.com'

If you use :fail: as a catchall addy, it simply gets forwarded to ether, i.e. null...

[Ron]

:discard: drops it on the floor; :fail: bounces it back.
OSIBT

[Vin DSL]

Ah! I see! Well, you learn something new every day.

Now, what does OSIBT mean?

[Vin DSL]

Man, it doesn't take long! It's been, what, 4 days?

• 

[Ron]

Or So I've Been Told

Seems to work that way, too. Give it a whirl. Also, you probably don't want to bounce emails, especially from that hugely spammed account of yours.

Bouncing emails can get your server listed in SpamCop, believe it or not. They figure that virii spoof the return address, so bouncing emails does nothing but further internet traffic and confusion, etc. It happened to my server, because Jag was programmatically bouncing "unsafe" extensions (.pif, .exe, etc.)

SpamCop wants you to silently drop them. The bounces were redirected to one of their secret accounts and that automagically added the server to their list, which caused a colleague's company to block emails from my domain.

BTW, how the heck did you get an address that catches so much crappola?

[Vin DSL]

Thanks! That's 3 things I've learned today (already). This is going to be a good day; I can tell!

Originally posted by Ron
BTW, how the heck did you get an address that catches so much crappola?

Well, I've been on the web since '96, so my email addy isn't exactly a secret. Plus, I guess they think my weiner is too small. I get a lot of offers to make it bigger...

[JPC-Masood]

:fail: will not bounce it back, it will reject the mail at SMTP level before receiving the mail. It is particularly good for worms that send emails to random addresses. Catch-all default address is highly recommended to be :fail:

[JPC-Masood]

Originally posted by Vin DSL
Okay, Plan-B...

Today is your lucky day, here are couple of neat tricks:

If you want the spam to be automatically deleted, you can create a symbolic link to /dev/null via ssh:

cd mail/domain.com/userid/
rm spam
ln -s /dev/null spam

All emails marked spam by spamassassin for this particular user will be dropped to bit bucket. [update: unfortunately this above trick does not work any more due to some changes in exim - still trying to figure out why this happened. 16/Feb/05 ]

And, if you ever have to delete such a big mailbox, without browsing through the emails to find false-negatives, you can do this via shell:

>spam

Pfff! This will empty the spam mailbox.