One Auto responder for all mailboxes? Is it possible?

BlueSteam

• December 17, 2023 12:25

Simple question... As an administrator of a cpanel server, I had a client who had over 45 mailboxes. They wanted the same autoresponder for all the mailboxes but it feels like a right pita to create an autoresponder for each and every mailbox individually. Is there a way to do one autoresponder for the entire domain??

• 

  rbairwell

  • December 17, 2023 14:14

  I wouldn't do this personally as when a dictionary attack spammer targets that domain and tries to send hundreds of emails to random addresses (which normally your server would reject with "no such user here" near the start of the transmission- and if you are running something like CSF - will then block them after a number of tries), your server will then receive these emails, process them and then send out autoresponders to the email address featured (which, knowing spammers, will be invalid - and so your server will queue up thousands of auto responses which it'll never deliver...)

  However, if you do want to proceed with this, try the following (for example.com):

  1) First make the auto-responder as per normal in cPanel under "Tools->Autoresponders" on a set email address (such as tester@example.com )

  2) Under "Tools->Default Address", set it to

  Send all unrouted email for the following domain: example.com

  Advanced Options:

  [select] Pipe to a program

  /usr/local/cpanel/bin/autorespond tester@example.com /home/example/.autorespond

  Where "tester@example.com" is the email address you set up in step 1 (it's needed here to be able to point towards the correct autoresponder file and configuration) and /home/example/ is the account directory of the user (whose cPanel username is "example")

  [Alternatively, for step 2:

  2) As root, open the file /etc/valiases/example.com and you'll see something like:

  tester@example.com: "|/usr/local/cpanel/bin/autorespond tester@example.com /home/example/.autorespond"
  *: :fail: No such person at this address.

  with the * entry being the "default address" setting. Change the file to be:

  tester@example.com: "|/usr/local/cpanel/bin/autorespond tester@example.com /home/example/.autorespond"
  *: "|/usr/local/cpanel/bin/autorespond tester@example.com /home/example/.autorespond"

  Hope it helps!

  1

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