How do I turn off incoming emails for individual user accounts?

Hi,

I've tried to deal with the spam, but I give up. Alex, the moderator of this forum, has given me excellent advice in the past on how to deal with spam, but I'm afraid it's no use, the spammers keep finding ways in and I simply haven't the time to maintain a robust spam-free email environment.

I have BSDi ISS4 running with Sendmail v8.12. When I created users on the system (using an older version of Webmin) I had the option of giving that user an email account or not.

Now, however, I have some old user email accounts that I want to turn off, but I don't want to just remove the whole user because certain programs might be attached to that old user account.

So, is it as simple as removing certain files from the user's home directory to turn off their email, or is it more complicated? If I can remove or rename certain files, which ones are involved? I see various email-looking files like these:

mail
.mailrc

and some other files that were added in my attempts to control spam such as these:

procmail.rc
Mail
.myemail

What I want is for all emails (whether spam or not) to just get rejected by the server for a particular user. Heck! If I could eliminate all incoming email entirely and only use Sendmail for those scripts on my site that send out email notification, that'd be great.

I'm going to use form-based email for my customer service enquiries from now on and our return email address is just going to be a free Yahoo! or some such account. I don't care if it doesn't have my domain name in it, I'm just fed up so much that's just the way it'll have to be.

You could configure your sendmail installation to use the access.db feature. Then configure those addresses to be rejected.

You'll have to read your sendmail installation docs. But it something like

FEATURE(`access')

in your .mc file, and your 'access' file is then probably in /etc/mail -- but may vary based on o/s type.

-c

cconstantine,

Ah! That's an excellent suggestion. I'll give that a try.

I found a nice write-up about this procedure on this page:

The /etc/mail/access and access.db files