Name
MaxRecipientsPerMessage
Synopsis
When sendmail receives email via SMTP, it gathers its list of envelope recipients from the RCPT TO: command. In that command, two envelope recipients might be specified (and acknowledged) like this:
RCPT To:<userA@your.host.domain> 250 2.1.5 <userA@your.host.domain>... Recipient OK RCPT To:<userB@your.host.domain> 250 2.1.5 <userB@your.host.domain>... Recipient OK
Here, each RCPT TO: line tells sendmail to deliver a copy of the message to each recipient specified in that line. Each shows the local sendmail acknowledging each recipient.
One method of spamming is to list thousands of recipients for each
message—that is, to specify thousands of RCPT TO: commands,
causing sendmail to deliver a copy of the
message to thousands of recipients. As an antispam measure, V8.10
sendmail introduced an option to limit the
number of recipients that can be specified for a given envelope.
Called MaxRecipientsPerMessage
, that option is
used like this:
O MaxRecipientsPerMessage=limit ← configuration file (V8.10 and later) -OMaxRecipientsPerMessage=limit ← command line (V8.10 and later) define(`confMAX_RCPTS_PER_MESSAGE', `limit')← mc configuration (V8.10 and later)
The limit
tells sendmail the
maximum number of recipients it will accept for the current envelope.
Any that are specified beyond this limit cause
sendmail to acknowledge with this message:
452 4.5.3 Too many recipients
A 452 SMTP acknowledgment tells the sending machine to defer delivery to this recipient ...
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