Utilities: Administration: Server: Server Settings: Security: Bans

Mail Receive Rules

Defines the rules by which ListManager determines whether or not mail should be processed.

By default, ListManager looks at the username of email it receives to determine whether it should process the message. The host name portion of the mail address is not consulted. It does this to support any number of virtual hosts without needing to be configured. By default, ListManager will automatically assume the hostname identity of any email it receives which is addressed to a valid ListManager user name.

This Mail Receive Rules option allows you to change this default behavior, so that ListManager first looks at the rules you have defined, and if the local recipient address does not match a rule, the message is not processed.

The Mail Receive Rules are simple text search rules. For example, to accept any mail addressed to the "yourcompany.com" domain, the rule would be:

yourcompany.com

This would allow any of these different addresses to be received:

lyris@yourcompany.com
lyris@lists.yourcompany.com
lyris@discussions.yourcompany.com

But any address which did not have "yourcompany.com" in it would be rejected.

If your rule was "@yourcompany.com", only the first example above "lyris@yourcompany.com" would be accepted.

The most common use for this feature is if you are using ListManager in front of another mail server, and you want to make sure that ListManager only accepts mail addressed to itself, and forwards on any mail addressed otherwise. If you have told it to "Forward non-ListManager Mail" to another location, any mail which does not match a "Mail Receive Rule" will automatically be forwarded on to the other server. See Utilizes: Administration: Server: Server Settings: Network Settings: Receive Email.

If you do not have "Forward non-ListManager Mail" defined, then mail which does not match a Mail Receive Rule will simply be rejected.

You can define multiple Mail Receive Rules, each on a separate line.

Ban All Mail From

This option allows you to reject any incoming mail from specific addresses. For example, if a user is a troublemaker, you can have ListManager automatically reject any postings from this person.

Note: This mail from: value applies to the SMTP transaction MAIL FROM: <> value. In email messages, this is usually, but not necessarily the same as the From: in the mail you receive. ListManager displays the MAIL FROM: <> value in any message it receives in the Return-Path: header line. Most other mail servers follow this convention as well.

You can use this feature if a user has threatened to mail bomb you and you want to protect your server from them. Mail bombing is the tactic of sending hundreds of messages to someone, in the hopes of overwhelming them, or their server, and wasting their time. If you ban someone's email with this technique, ListManager will not even accept their messages over SMTP, and the amount of processing it does for each message is extremely small, thus defusing the power of their mail bomb.

You can specify as many email addresses as you like, by putting each address on a separate line.

For example:

bob_mischief@example.com
jane_trouble@elsewhere.com

More

1. Utilities: Administration: Server: Server Settings

1. Utilities: Administration: Server: Server Settings: Security: User Limits

2. Utilities: Administration: Server: Server Settings: Security: Bans

3. Utilities: Administration: Server: Server Settings: Security: Web

4. Utilities: Administration: Server: Server Settings: Security: GUI Hosts

5.   Utilities: Administration: Server: Server Settings: Security: Spam Blocking