postmaster mail

[Robert Covell]

I too would be interested in the question about "abnormal amount of emails
to postmaster".  We get about 15K a day of these and just recently started
to pipe them into /dev/null.  It is more of a burden to delete them
manually.  Anyone else have high postmaster email counts?

Sincerely,

Robert T. Covell
President / Owner
Rolet Internet Services, LLC
Web: www.rolet.com
Email: rcovell at rolet.com
Phone: 816.471.1095
Fax: 816.471.3447
24x7: 816.210.7145

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-info-cyrus at lists.andrew.cmu.edu
> [mailto:owner-info-cyrus at lists.andrew.cmu.edu]On Behalf Of Scott Adkins
> Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 1:38 PM
> To: Cyrus Info Mailing List
> Subject: postmaster mail
>
>
> Okay, I thought I would pull from the wisdom from the group, but I hope it
> isn't too far off topic.
>
> We have been using an alias for the root account to get all root destined
> mail to the /var/spool/mail/root mailbox, bypassing the Cyrus system.
> However, our system has grown significantly over the years and now we get
> on average 25,000 messages a day to the root account alone.  Basically,
> we just fire up mailx and delete everything.  If there is anything useful
> in that mailbox, it is doubtful we would have ever found it anyways.
>
> So, today, I created the user.root mailbox and changed the alias so that
> all the mail can go to it.  I also created a postmaster subfolder and
> directory the postmaster alias to send its mail to root+postmaster.  It
> all works... really works... :)
>
> It is clear that 99.9% of all our mail is postmaster mail.  It looks like
> it is mostly unknown user mails, over quota mails, connection refused or
> deferred mails, etc.  I know that there may be some important postmaster
> mail that we should keep... obviously, we have been deleting stuff for a
> long time, but it would be nice to not delete blindly and actually keep
> the important messages we should be dealing with.  Incidentally, in the
> last 20 minutes, 300 messages came into the postmaster folder.
>
> So, the question is, do we just turn off postmaster mail altogether (is
> that actually doable?  maybe by setting PostmasterCopy to nothing?), or
> do I somehow build an intelligent sieve script that throws away most the
> stuff that we think are junk?
>
> What have you guys done?  I am more interested in the larger email system,
> ones receiving on the order of 500k+ messages a day.  Is it abnormal to
> see such a large volume of postmaster mail like this?  Have any of you
> developed a sieve script that would be useful to the Cyrus community as a
> whole?
>
> Enquiring minds want to know!
>
> Thanks for any thoughts on the subject...
> Scott
> --
>  +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
>       Scott W. Adkins                http://www.cns.ohiou.edu/~sadkins/
>    UNIX Systems Engineer                  mailto:adkinss at ohio.edu
>         ICQ 7626282                 Work (740)593-9478 Fax (740)593-1944
>  +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
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