How to get sendmail bounces to go port 25 again (milters)

kenw232 · 10-23-2020, 07:58 AM

I have a sendmail mail server running on CentOS 8. All great. I also have mimedefang installed. It will track sent messages to the database.

I now want to track the bounces via mimedefang too. But bounces are immediately and locally send to postmaster. they don't get processed through sendmail and the milters so I can't get mimedefang to see them to track them.

How do I fix this? What can I do to track bounces? Can I tell sendmail.mc to send all bounces back through itself again so mimedefang can see them? Connect a perl script to the postmaster email address? I prefer a mimedefang solution if possible.

Thanks for any ideas.

computersavvy · 10-23-2020, 01:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kenw232

I have a sendmail mail server running on CentOS 8. All great. I also have mimedefang installed. It will track sent messages to the database.

I now want to track the bounces via mimedefang too. But bounces are immediately and locally send to postmaster. they don't get processed through sendmail and the milters so I can't get mimedefang to see them to track them.

How do I fix this? What can I do to track bounces? Can I tell sendmail.mc to send all bounces back through itself again so mimedefang can see them? Connect a perl script to the postmaster email address? I prefer a mimedefang solution if possible.

Thanks for any ideas.

I don't really have a definite solution but the issue is the path. The returned bounces are incoming mail. The sent mail is outgoing mail and you are already processing it with mimedefang. Those are processed differently by sendmail since incoming mail is sent directly to local mailboxes (after any antivirus scanning if that is set up). You would need to look at how to process incoming mail with mimedefang if you wish the same type of record.

You could alias postmaster to a specific user set up for that purpose, then that users incoming mail would be whatever was sent to postmaster. I believe postmaster is normally aliased to root.

BTW, why rescan with mimedefang? The bounces would have been already scanned on the outgoing path.

kenw232 · 10-23-2020, 01:59 PM

I want rescan because I want the bounce information, not necessarily the original sending message details. I need a way to track all bounces within a database. And the problem is bounces are sent directly to local mailboxes like you said. I need them to somehow be processed by mimedefang too. I want bounces to go to port 25 too, not just direct deposit/delivery.

bathory · 10-24-2020, 02:02 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kenw232

I want rescan because I want the bounce information, not necessarily the original sending message details. I need a way to track all bounces within a database. And the problem is bounces are sent directly to local mailboxes like you said. I need them to somehow be processed by mimedefang too. I want bounces to go to port 25 too, not just direct deposit/delivery.

You could use procmail to process bounces.

scasey · 10-24-2020, 03:13 AM

Bounces from other servers should go through your smtp server on port 25.
That would happen, for example, if the user in the remote server didn’t exist.

If the bounce is from your server...if the To: domain doesn’t exist..., it never left, so it won’t show up.

What problem are you trying to solve?