Powetmaster undeliverd loop prevention

Hello,

I recently had an issue where one of the requestor emails was bouncing,
and a reply was sent from postmaster back to RT. The reply also
contained the subject tag, so caused a correspondence on the ticket,
mailing the bouncing requestor again and creating another postmaster mail.

I see there is bulk detection, and

Set($RedistributeAutoGeneratedMessages, “privileged”);

But the loop was caused by mails from postmaster@domain.com which
corresponded to requestor unknownuser@domain.com who was unprivileged.

I’m unsure if i have things set up right - ideally any mails from
postmaster would never get sent to anyone.

secondly

if i disable a user, mails that are rejected cause a mail to OwnerEmail
(faied to crete ticket) - i don’t want a mail to OwnerEmail as they’re
basically spam users that are disabled, but i do want OwnerEmail to
appear on the login page for support enquiries.

I see i can turn off loop detection mails with

Set($LoopsToRTOwner, 1);

but don’t see anything to stop the “fialed to create ticket” emails

thanks

Woody.

Richard Wood (Woody)
Managing Director
Wild Thing Safaris Ltd.

UK: 2B Habbo St, Greenwich, London
Dar es Salaam: 5 Ethan St, Mbezi beach
Arusha: 3 Ebeneezer Rd, Njiro
PO BOX 34514 DSM
Office: +255 (0) 222 617 166
Office Mobile: +255 (0) 773 503 502
Direct: +255 742 373 327
Skype: woody1tz

Hello,

I recently had an issue where one of the requestor emails was
bouncing, and a reply was sent from postmaster back to RT. The reply
also contained the subject tag, so caused a correspondence on the
ticket, mailing the bouncing requestor again and creating another
postmaster mail.

I see there is bulk detection, and

Set($RedistributeAutoGeneratedMessages, “privileged”);

But the loop was caused by mails from postmaster@domain.com which
corresponded to requestor unknownuser@domain.com who was unprivileged.

I’m unsure if i have things set up right - ideally any mails from
postmaster would never get sent to anyone.

One solution for bounces hitting RT:
http://www.mailermailer.com/labs/projects/RT-Bounce-Handler.rwp

secondly

if i disable a user, mails that are rejected cause a mail to
OwnerEmail (faied to crete ticket) - i don’t want a mail to OwnerEmail
as they’re basically spam users that are disabled, but i do want
OwnerEmail to appear on the login page for support enquiries.

I see i can turn off loop detection mails with

Set($LoopsToRTOwner, 1);

but don’t see anything to stop the “fialed to create ticket” emails

It is best to handle that at the MTA rather than in RT. If you have
widely-exposed addresses feeding into RT which autocreate users & new
tickets, you really need a robust spam filtering rig protecting RT that
is configured specifically for RT protection. The strong bias towards
permanence in RT makes it a nuisance to try to clean up after the spam
has gotten in; it’s easier to just keep it out.

I don’t have a spam problem with the RT I currently manage, but
something I’ve done on past systems was to have a “Spammers” group in RT
and periodically extract its members email addresses and use that as a
bi-directional blacklist on the MTA, in my case as part of a ‘make’
process that rebuilt the Sendmail AccessDB. Once an address is blocked
at the MTA, you can shred the bogus account and the ticket(s) it created
in RT. I can’t share my code and am not sure that I even still have a
copy of it, but the concept is pretty easy to implement. If you’re using
Postfix it would be simpler than with Sendmail, since you don’t have a
monolithic BDB AccessDB to rebuild with each change.