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From: watson@shinobu.sgi.com (David M. Watson, Jr.)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc,comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: Bouncing mail for expired users
Message-ID: <WATSON.90Mar8145125@shinobu.sgi.com>
Date: 8 Mar 90 14:51:25 GMT
References: <5637@ur-cc.UUCP> <25F514B1.5E18@tct.uucp>
Sender: news@shinobu.SGI.COM
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc., Mtn. View, CA
Lines: 34
In-reply-to: chip@tct.uucp's message of 7 Mar 90 14:03:28 GMT


In article <25F514B1.5E18@tct.uucp> chip@tct.uucp (Chip Salzenberg) writes:

>  >What I would like to do is to bounce mail for such users back to the sender
>  >with a useful message, like "Account expired."
>
>   Create a post-user delivery file that looks like this:
>
>	   for u
>	   do
>	       if grep "^${u}$" /usr/lib/mail/expired >/dev/null
>	       then
>		   echo "$u?Account expired."
>	       else
>		   echo "$u"
>	       fi
>	   done
>
>   Then create the file "/usr/lib/mail/expired" with a list of expired
>   accounts, one per line.

This and the other automatic response schemes create a distressing
possibility.  In this particular case, the pathological situation arises
when a user who has just sent mail to an expired user becomes expired
herself.  Then the two mailboxes exchange mail, never generating errors,
possibly forever, or at least for a very long time, until the message
body exceeds some size limit or fills a disk drive.

So, does anyone currently try to prevent this?  The capability to
automatically bounce mail would be nice, but without safeguards it's
dangerous.

		-David Watson
		 Silicon Graphics, Inc.