Use :blackhole: or :fail:?

[EricK]

Hello,

My understanding was that :blackhole: is better, as this avoids sending a response. But after reading this article http://www.configserver.com/free/fail.html I now think that :fail: is better. What do you think?

Kind regards,
Eric4

quote:

* Using :blackhole: email is accepted and received into the server in its entirety. It is then processed through exim and only on delivery is it written to the null device (/dev/null) and silently ignored.

o This wastes server bandwidth as the the data, or body, of the email is accepted into the server
o This wastes server resources (CPU, memory and disk I/O) as the email is fully processed by exim before being finally written to /dev/null
o This actually breaks the SMTP RFC's because you're not notifying the sending SMTP server that the email is undelivered, which is a requirement


* Using :fail: the email is never accepted into the server. During the initial SMTP negotiation when the senders SMTP server connects to your SMTP server, the sending SMTP server issues a RCPT command notifying your server which email address the email to follow is intended for. Your server then checks whether the recipient email actually exists on your server (a POP3 account, an alias or a catchall alias) and if it does not, it issues an SMTP DENY which terminates the attempt to deliver the email.

o This saves bandwidth as the email data is never received into your server
o This saves server resources as the email never has to be processed
o This complies with the SMTP RFC's because the sending SMTP server receives the DENY command
o Your server does not send a bounce message (just the DENY command)
o Your server does not send anything to the sender of the email (i.e. the address in the From: line)
o The sending SMTP server is responsible for notifying the original sender

[Matt]

I default the servers all to :fail: but it is a matter of personal preference.

[Matt]

Let me follow up on this one that I agree with configserver and also what we do on our accounts is not only :fail: them but remove the default address from the control panel. it is far less confusing for the end-user.

You can remove it from the feature list in your Web Host Manager (assuming you are a reseller)

Then if they need some "catch all" functionality for their email, they can setup the individual forwarders to a real POP3 or IMAP account. You'll find the majority of users requesting a catch all email address really only want it to catch about 5 or 10 email addresses. When you explain to them that having it harvest every bit of trash sent to *@theirdomain.com they are more than happy to agree it is not worth all the added Spam.

We are still begging cPanel to remove the "main account" function under email management because it can be just as confusing to the end-user as the default address. Heck, its confusing to me at times why it would even be implemented. The main account is an inbox which fills up with mostly trash and is accessable by logging into it with your cpanel username and password.

This is a conflict of how every other mail account on the server works. "Real" email accounts require full login, meaning user@domain.com with that email addresses password. http://www.glowhost.com/forums/showt...hlight=webmail

For this reason, we also disable the webmail link in the feature manager since it takes you to the worthless "main account" box by default.

The user can still gain webmail access in cPanel by going into mail > add/remove/manage accounts and selecting the webmail link next to the associated email address, or, by simply visiting theirdomain.com/webmail and doing it that way.

This has dramatically reduced support requests since we implemented this system.