I’ve created an email forwarder using my hosting control panel. The email address forwards email sent to it to a small group of recipients (under 30). Problem is email harvesting bots somehow got a hold of this email address, so now my group is getting spammed. Is there a way to do a simple validation (a whitelist check) on the email sender before it gets forwarded to the whole group? That way if the sender isn’t in the whitelist the email won’t go through? Like I said earlier I set this forwarder up via the control panel of the hosting account. The server is running apache. I don’t want anything complicated (such as a mailing list), just the ability for any one in the group to email a single address and that email will be forwarded onto everyone within that group. Thanks for your help
Can you execute anything (PHP, etc) on this server when an email arrives, but before it gets forwarded?
Yeah my hosting server supports PHP, perl, and others. Is there a way to route that email to a PHP or perl script so I could check it before it is forwarded to the group?
That's what I was asking - if your mail server supports any kind of pre- or post-processing of the incoming mail. In general, you can't do this kind of thing with simple mail forwarding, unless your mail server supports this kind of operations. Some servers do, but I doubt that a hosting would expose this functionality (too much interaction with unreliable third-party components). Another approach is to ask if your hosting company's mail server can be configured to accept ETRN/OMDR operations. In this configuration, you would run your own SMTP server that would connect to your hosting company's mail server just to pick up mail. So, then you can run any kind of mail server on your cable/DSL connection (no need for a dedicated IP address) and simply configure a moderated mailing list. J.D.