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From: 7thSon@SLCS.SLB.COM (Chris Garrigues)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc,comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: Bouncing mail for expired users
Message-ID: <19900308003637.2.7THSON@GLOWWORM.LispM.SLCS.SLB.COM>
Date: 8 Mar 90 00:36:00 GMT
References: <25F52F02.18B3@marob.masa.com>
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    From: cowan@marob.masa.com
    Date: Wed, 7 Mar 90 09:55 CST
    
    In article <5637@ur-cc.UUCP> Mark Sirota <msir@cc.rochester.edu> writes:
    >What I think I want to do is create an alias in sendmail's alias file which
    >will cause a message to bounce, but with a particular message.
     
    An easy hack would be to alias those users to a user with a name like
    account_expired.  This alias would be resolved and then bounced with the
    error "account_expired: user unknown".  This is not perfect but would tell
    the tale.
    

My quick solution would be to put these lines in my .cf file:

# This goes near the beginning of the file somewhere
FE/somewhere/expired-users

# This goes just before sending local mail.
R$=E	$#error $: The user %1 is no longer at this host.

and the referenced file contains a list of expired users.

The more involved solution would be to pass the username into a script
which would generate a more informative error message which could even
look up where the user can now be reached.

What we actually do here is to keep forwarding addresses "forever".


Chris Garrigues,
Postmaster@SLCS.SLB.COM