Is there a way to delete email at the server...

[RobLarsen]

...without creating a bounce message?

I still receive an occasional flood of forged from: address bounce spam (even after having killed my catch-all account) and it makes checking email on my phone cumbersome, so I'm trying to kill emails with typical bounce messages ("Delivery Status Notification (Failure)", etc) and in testing I've discovered I'm generating bounce messages myself! Using a "black hole" address generates a bounce message (and a warning that the message is looping) and sending it to a dead account creates a bounce message saying the account doesn't exist. Is there no way to just kill the thing there and then without perpetuating the very thing I'm trying to avoid myself?

(1st post, I think. Interesting considering I've been on FQ for close to a decade now.)

[sheila]

Hey Rob, I've taken a look at your Email Manager just to make sure you don't have filters set up to bounce or something, and you don't have any filters set to bounce. All of your filters are set to delete.

When you write:
so I'm trying to kill emails with typical bounce messages ("Delivery Status Notification (Failure)", etc) and in testing I've discovered I'm generating bounce messages myself! Using a "black hole" address generates a bounce message (and a warning that the message is looping) and sending it to a dead account creates a bounce message saying the account doesn't exist. Is there no way to just kill the thing there and then without perpetuating the very thing I'm trying to avoid myself?
I'm not exactly clear on what you're doing or what you've tried.

Could you provide specifics and exact details?

[RobLarsen]

I actually deleted the one I was messing around with, so there's nothing to see there at the moment. What I want is to:

(a) never see any common* bounce message again.
(b) not create a bounce message of my own.

To do (a) I tried a variation of the condredirect forward@example.com sh -c '822field
subject | grep -qiFf "/big/dom/xdomain/badsubj.txt"' example here (http://service.futurequest.net/index.php?_a=knowledgebase&_j=questiondetails&_i=97). I tried forwarding it to two separate "black hole" addresses (one of which I created for just this occasion), which, based on the documentation at least, seems to be what I'm supposed to do to "delete" emails and BOTH produced a bounce message when testing from Gmail.

So, the good news is, the emails never made it to my inbox. The bad news is I created a bounce message that starts like this

"Hi. This is the qmail-send program at mx04.futurequest.net.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

<devnull@drunkenfist.com>:
This message is looping.

--- Below this line is a copy of the message."

I also tried against a nonexistent email address. that too created a bounce message.

*I'm testing against:

Delivery Status Notification (Failure)
Message you sent blocked by our bulk email filter
failure notice
Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender
Returned mail: see transcript for details
Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender

[sheila]

Rob, since your catch-all email address is disabled, sending to a non-existent address will not create a bounce message. Instead you are getting something that looks similar, but is actually different. You're getting a delivery failure notification from your own SMTP server rather than a bounce notice from the recipient's mail server. (Of course, in your case, they may very possibly be one and the same mail server.)

I'm still having a bit of trouble following this exactly.

In order to follow this we need to know exactly the email addresses that were involved. Which address sent FROM and which address sent TO. We need to know/see exactly the email filters that were configured at the time, any support files (such as badsubj.txt) exactly as they were at the time the filter ran. We need to see the complete bounce message, including the complete headers of the message that couldn't be delivered (these are usually included in the bounce or delivery failure notice). Also if you would provide the date, time and time zone when the test messages were sent, so that we can search the mail logs (if you provide the complete headers, this data would probably be in there).

It is just so tricky tracking down what may have gone wrong on a mail delivery that we need complete details and all possible information about the situation.

Thanks!

(If you prefer to send this information to the Service Desk rather than posting it in the forums, that is OK too.)

[RobLarsen]

I just sent it into support.

Thanks!