I have a forum also but alot of users are registering with false addresses so I get bounce back emails sent to me saying : Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender How can I configure the server/block these emails from entering my email box? I tried blocking the above phrase with no luck. Thanks
how about setting the forum to require email activation before they can finish the signup? that would sort that prob out.
err, that's the problem. It's setup that way, so that if someone enters a false email address - I get a bounced back email telling me that the email account doesn't exist...
cant ya set it so that they have to validate there account via an email before they can use their account like phpbb, vbulletin etc does? what forum script u using?
hmm, it is setup like PHPBB...A new user submits their email address and then receives an email later on saying something like "you need to activate the link in this email"... However, if a user submits a false address the server still processes the submission but bounces back the email to me...this is true for most of the forum scripts. My point is how to stop the bounce back emails from my server...
Check who's server sends these notifications. There're two possible situations: - you server receives 550 (mailbox not found) and sends you a notification - the receiving server (which may be configured to relay mail to the destination server may not know whether the mailbox is valid or not) passes it along to the destination server, which rejects mail and sends you a notification In the first case, depending on which server you use, you may be able to suppress these message by changing the configuration. In the second case, all SMTP servers will send rejectijon messages in a different format and it's not easy to set up a filter (you can probably catch some of the bigger ones, like hotmail.com or yahoo.com). J.D.
Use a separate email to send out the forum activation emails (e.g. ) and setup a filter to pipe all messages sent to that address to /dev/null (i.e. delete them).
Thanks guys. It's my server, so I can pretty much do anything with it. I think the problem is I don't know how to change the configuration as filters don't pick up the "Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender" as it's probably made on fly? As for a pipe message filter...is your suggestion to forward and filter emails to another address...that might work I guess hmm (scratches head)
My suggestion is to send out forum activation emails from a given address (not the one you'd use for emailing friends or whatever) and turn that address into a blackhole by basically deleting everything sent to it - like when you get messages from Amazon saying "please don't reply to this mail, responses will not be received". That way you're not doing any filtering whatsoever, you're just deleting everything sent to the address used as the From: header in activation emails.
In many mail servers it would still qualify as filtering. That is, one of the filters would say "if the mail is to blackhole @ domain.com, delete it". J.D.
JD is on the correct track. This is what we recommend all our client do with their forums. They set something up like - and when someone sends something to , it is automatically deleted.
yep but I don't think the forum is as clever as that...The email address also doubles up as Report to Moderator post and as a contact point. Instead of setting up a blackhole why don't I just use an unlisted email address...not really the solution I was looking for as my forum email address is still active. Thanks anyway guys.