cpanel email filter question

[-Anti-]

First of all, this is just a question... please don't go to my account and configure anything based on my query here; I know how eager you are to fix all my problems! lol.

OK, with that out of the way here we go...

I am just about to add several hundred users into our new school website. Drupal allows me to make a CSV file from excel and do a bulk import. I am doing this primarily because drupal requires a unique email for each account. Not only do most of the children not have email addresses, personally I don't think they should due to spam. Plus, I want to hold as little information about the students as possible on the server.

So, in my excel file I generated fake emails for everyone:
[username]@nomail.mydomain.com

Note that I did not create the 'nomail' subdomain in cpanel.
These emails will be in the drupal profiles, but cannot be edited by students.

OK, so the problem is that I can't guarantee that drupal won't try to sometimes send mail out to these fake addresses. Probable culprits might be the password reminder, self-subscribing newsletters, contact forms, webforms, etc. There are a lot of features in drupal that simply assume all users have a working email.

At the moment when an email is sent to/from a fake, exim sends a DENY command, which then produces a daemon message to the drupal admin email address. What I'd instead like is for the mail to/from the fakes, to be just discarded without a trace.

In cpanel, will the email -> filter tool achieve this without using too many resources or causing problems elsewhere??
I've created a rule: 'any header contains nomail.mydomain.com then discard'


Thanks.

[Jack]

You wish to make this changes server wide or just the email addresses which are created in Drupal ?

[-Anti-]

I guess server-wide; from anywhere, to anywhere.

I'm just trying to anticipate a time when someone accidentally instructs drupal to email all 400 users
and so I get hundreds of daemon messages, and the server slows down for a while.

BTW, I just tested the above filter, and it seems to work fine (EDIT: no it doesn't; :fail: precedes the filter).
I gather the disadvantage is that the email is actually fully processed by exim before it is discarded(?)

Maybe there is a smarter way to do it?

Cheers.

[eUKhost.com]

Hi,

Best option would be to set :blackhole: for all invalid mailboxes on your domain. This can be done from "Default Address » Advanced Options" and then choose the option "Discard (Not Recommended)"

This will simply discard the emails which will be sent to invalid email addresses.

[-Anti-]

Thanks for the advice.

Apologies. I said... "I guess server-wide; from anywhere, to anywhere", when what I really meant was 'server-wide for the nomail subdomain', if that isn't a paradox!

To clarify, I want to :fail: all other domains/subdomains, and blackhole just the 'nomail' subdomain. But I don't see a way of setting a :blackhole: catchall for the 'nomail' subdomain without setting it up as a real subdomain.

I guess creating the subdomain will have to do; it should solve the problem, which is the main thing.

Cheers for the advice and help.

[jennifer]

Hi,

I found that adding the entries of :fail: & :blackhole: in the configuration files manually and adding a DNS zone for the sub domain will do the trick.

Worth giving a shot.. and let me know how you get on it!

[-Anti-]

I knew there would be a smart way to do it.
I couldn't find the config file for the catchall setting.

Anyway, I did it the dumb way; I created the subdomain in cpanel and set up the catchall to blackhole for all incoming mail just to that subdomain (the others are set to fail), and setup a filter which I hope will discard any mail sent from drupal without causing any errors in the script(s).

I deleted public_html/nomail to declutter the directory, and it doesn't cause any problem. This solution will do fine, and actually, thinking about it, if I ever have to hand the site over to another maintainer, the fact that this is all setup visibly in cpanel will be better for them.

Thanks very much for your input.

[eUKhost.com]

Originally Posted by -Anti-

I knew there would be a smart way to do it.
I couldn't find the config file for the catchall setting.

Anyway, I did it the dumb way; I created the subdomain in cpanel and set up the catchall to blackhole for all incoming mail just to that subdomain (the others are set to fail), and setup a filter which I hope will discard any mail sent from drupal without causing any errors in the script(s).

I deleted public_html/nomail to declutter the directory, and it doesn't cause any problem. This solution will do fine, and actually, thinking about it, if I ever have to hand the site over to another maintainer, the fact that this is all setup visibly in cpanel will be better for them.

Thanks very much for your input.

yep.

You have done it all right. You are most welcome to ask simple questions like this.