[Dovecot] Using Dovecot-auth to return error code 450 (or other 4xx) to Postfix when user is on vacation

[IVO GELOV (CRM)]

On Fri, 13 Jan 2012 20:03:36 +0200, Charles Marcus <CMarcus at media-brokers.com> wrote:

> On 2012-01-13 12:11 PM, IVO GELOV (CRM) <ivo at crm.walltopia.com> wrote:
>> I am aware of the various autoresponder scripts for vacation autoreplies
>> (I am using Virtual Vacation 3.1 by Mischa Peters).
>> I have an issue with auto-replies - it is vulnerable to spamming with
>> forged email address.
>
> I think you are using an extremely old/outdated version...
>
> The latest version would not suffer this problem, because it has a lot
> of message types that it will *not* respond to, including messages
> appearing to be from yourself...
>
> Get the latest version fro the postfixadmin package.
>
> However, I don't know how to use it without also using postfixadmin (it
> creates databases for storing the vacation message, etc)...
>

I have downloaded the latest version 4.0 - but it seems there is no way to prevent
spammers to use forged email addresses. I decided to remove the vacation feature
 from our corporate mail server, because it actually opens a backdoor (even though
only when someone decides to activate his vacation auto-reply) for spammers and
puts a risk on the company (our server can be blacklisted).

I still think that my idea with custom error codes is more useful - if the user is
on vacation, the message is rejected immediately (no auto-reply is sent) and sender
can see (hopefully, because most users just ignore error messages) the reason why
the messages was rejected.

Probably Dovecot-auth does not offer such flexibility right now - but it worths
considering.