Stop Delivery Status Notification (Failure) messages with Windows 2003 Server SMTP Server

Question

How do I stop the SMTP Service on Windows 2003 (not exchange) from sending "Delivery Status Notification (Failure)" messages?

I'm trying to prevent a trick that spammers use of sending a message to a bogus user on my server's domain, with the sender's address as the Spam victim's address.

The result is that the SMTP Service will send back to the listed "sender" a "Delivery Status Notification (Failure)" message, which contains the spam message.

Answer 1

Configure your server to not accept mails for noon-existant recipient addresses. I don't have an Exchange right now to test that, but probably something like:

From Exchange System Manager, Global Settings, Internet Message Format, double click on your right. Advanced tab. Uncheck Allow non-delivery reports.

Also see here.

Answer 2

I found a discussion about this topic on Coding Horror. I went with the scripted solution by Alex Feinman. The things I ran into is that if you have more than one domain, you can only have one catch all for all domains. Also, this doesn't cleanup the catch all folder, so you need another script to do that, or do it manually.