Limiting sendmails Max Recipients
There have been a lot of attempts lately on peoples servers to send spam through online forms. This is done by creating a crafty email with a carefully placed Bcc: tag which is then remotely submitted to your unsuspecting form on your server.
All the email that goes through your form now from this person script will look like it came from your server. And hey, sendmail won't know what is going on because it thinks you, a trusty ole soul, is sending this bulk email.
Apart from making your forms secure, you can deter the spammers by limiting how many recipients sendmail will send to with each email. Currently, if a spammer puts 100 email address in the fake Bcc: field in the spam, sendmail will gladly forward that email to those 100 recipients. All within the matter of a few minutes.
To limit this amount simply follow these instruction:
Step 1 - Backup your working copy of sendmail.cf before starting.
cp /etc/mail/sendmail.cf /etc/mail/sendmail.cf.working
Step 2 - Modify the existing copy of sendmail.cf
pico -w /etc/mail/sendmail.cf
Find the following line:
#O MaxRecipientsPerMessage=0
and change it to look like this:
O MaxRecipientsPerMessage=15
Save your file, and restart sendmail:
/sbin/service sendmail restart
Sendmail will now only send an email that has 15 or less recipients. Either in the To:, Cc: or Bcc: fields.
Happy mailing!