I've searched high and low, and just cannot figure this out. I have an email address (in /etc/aliases which is read by EXIM4) that I used at a DNS registrar that published all of my account information. So, of course, the 87 million spammers out there now have this email address. I've removed it from /etc/aliases, commented it out, put it back and then changed forwarding to another account as well as /dev/null. If I do ANY of these things to ANY other account in that aliases file, mail no longer gets delivered. Does anybody have any idea why this ONE email alias that all the goddamn SPAMMERs have will not just go the hell away? Almost half of the spam I get is to this one email address, and that's in the tens of thousands of messages every year.
EDIT SOLVED:
OMFG!!! I had a *second* alias with half of the name spelled with CaPiTaL letters (e.g. GODaddy***, instead of godaddy). Thank gods I used grep -i instead of just grep!! This has been niggling my soul for YEARS! Thanks to everyone who pushed me to finally resolve this idiocy. (mine, in this case! :-p )
Thank you, kind sysadmins! Sometimes just asking the question, and getting some positive feedback is all it takes to solve a DECADES old problem. 🙂 <3
There are going to be a LOT of evil spammers crying in their milk for the next several months. I hope they suffer from the FLOOD of bouncing spam. hehehehe
***I am convinced that Bob, the diehard Christian founder of GODaddy, deliberately spelled it that way because he wanted to be the GOD of all addresses on the Internet, but spoke it as GOdaddy, so as not to alienate non-God people. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I may be wrong, but I'm sticking with that theory…but NOT spelling anything with CAps again in a config file!
Source: r/sysadmin · by /u/captain42d