How to disable all bounce back email in exim 4.69

Question

I have set up an email server to send out solicited newsletters.

There should be no "regular" users of this server, so it is not desirable to send bounce notifications back to the recipient. Especially so since I am tracking bounces myself by parsing the log files periodically.

What I want is to unconditionally prevent exim from ever sending a bounce notification email back to a sender.

How can I do this?

Thank you!

(I accidentally posted this to superuser before posting it here, disregard that if you come across)

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What I want is an email server that will accept all incoming emails, deliver it accordingly (that is remotely or locally) and not send a bounce notification the sender upon bounce.

I log bounces myself, in a database. The only function bounce messages have in my setting is to waste resources and bandwidth.

I need to send emails fast, using exiwhat during a run, I see a significant number of deliveries to [email protected]. I could potentially increase my email productivity by 10~20% if all bounce emails are eliminated.

Answer 1

You can set up Exim to accept all incoming email, and then blackhole (that is, silently discard) it. Add this as your first router:

blackhole_incoming:
driver = redirect
data = :blackhole:

Alternatively it might be good to send be a warning to your server doesn't accept email, and who should be contacted. For that you can set up a router and transport like this, but please heed the warning at the end:

auto_reply_router:
driver = accept
no_verify
no_expn
transport = auto_reply_transport

auto_reply_transport: driver = autoreply from = "[email protected]" to = ${sender_address} subject = "Auto reply something something" text = "Thanks for mailing us, but we don't accept messages here. Please email [email protected] for support"

WARNING: This will mean anyone can email your server and cause an auto-reply to be sent to any innocent third party. If you want to do this, use the "condition" option to the router, to apply a condition which makes sure the person being email actually received a mail from you recently which they're replying to. You can do a database lookup here to achieve this if you store your outbound mail records in a database.

Answer 2

use the 'blackhole_incoming' router provided by Avleen, but dont use it as first one.
Your probably best off using it as the last one, but this depends on your routers (try...).

a couple of things i need to tell you...
If you want to do autoreplys take Avleens warning serious and read this:
http://wiki.exim.org/EximAutoReply#Rules_for_Autoreply_Messages if you dont want to be vulnerable to backscatter.

if you still use the version you stated in the header your server's been probably hacked allready...
UPDATE! Seriously, you need 4.72+ to be save from the 'HeaderX' Vulnerability

And...
Dont answer your own questions unless you have an answer (you can edit your original post or comment an answer)