Catch alls - a temporary fix

[TW_Adam]

Hi All, I usually beg for help on these forums, so it's a pleasant surprise for me to be able to offer something useful for a change.

Like most of us, I have catchalls set to bounce. This helps make sure that we don't process a ton of mail for people that don't exist. And like most of us, I have clients that insist they know more about this than we do, and set a catch all on their domain.

Since these clients refuse to listen to reason I tried a number of things to stop catch alls from being set. Setting the read only bit on the .qmail-default only pissed off qmail until it was set back the way it was supposed to be.

The solution: Freebsd allows you to set an immutable flag. (man chflags) I tested this on a dud domain, and the domain continued to process mail normally, but when I tried to set a catch all on that domain I was not able to. I received a small "File system error in .qmail-default" I would test it on your particular setup, but it seems to work on mine.

The downside is you would have to remove this flag in order to delete the domain. 'ls -lo' will show that this flag is set. Until the catchall feature is something that can be removed this may work for you.

Hope this helps somebody.

..Adam