Can I make an email address undeliverable with Procmail?

cbiweb

I've never used Procmail before, and I only need to know how to 'hide' from spammers.

I have an email address that I don't use anymore but I don't want to delete it yet.
It gets a lot of spam, though, and I'd like to make it look like that address no longer exists.

Is that possible with Procmail?

sean

cbiweb you'll need to have procmail set the EXITCODE variable to send an error back to the mail server.

There's a good example at https://serverfault.com/a/775166. That one uses a filter criteria but if you want to bounce everything sent to the address the rule would be:

:0
{ EXITCODE=67 HOST= }

The downside to this is that if you get a lot of spam you might cause backscatter spam. This happens when the spammer spoofs or hijacks a legitimate email address to send spam, causing the bounce messages (along with the spammy message) to be bounced back to the unsuspecting sender address. If you're getting hundreds/thousands of spam messages per day then I'd definitely advise against doing this.

cbiweb

Thanks, Sean. Yeah, it averages out to about 40 per day, so it shouldn't be a problem, hopefully.