There was a request that went around for months from a plesk administrator griping about the various messages that appear in his mailbox, such as the dr.web license notification. By default, messages to the root and postmaster accounts are sent to the plesk administrator. This is accomplished via qmail aliases.

# cd /var/qmail/alias/
# ls -al
total 28
drwxr-sr-x 2 alias qmail 4096 Mar 9 01:59 .
drwxr-xr-x 11 root qmail 4096 Sep 29 21:14 ..
-rw-r–r– 1 root qmail 26 Dec 10 2007 .qmail-mailer-daemon
-rw-r–r– 1 root qmail 16 Mar 9 01:57 .qmail-postmaster
-rw-r–r– 1 root qmail 16 Mar 9 01:57 .qmail-root

Typically these look something link this:
# cat .qmail-postmaster
&plesk_admin_address@foo.bar.com

To keep the customer happy, I made a slight amendment to the alias:

# cat .qmail-postmaster
|cat >/dev/null
# cat .qmail-root
|cat >/dev/null

Removing the aliases will cause all kinds of noise in the logs and actually break the server’s already fragile rfc compliance (rfc2821:4.5.1) . This allows the messages to be ‘handled’ silently. Since most plesk ‘administrators’ don’t care to know how many failed ssh attempts there were in a month, or how much disk space they are using, it is usually a working solution when you can’t get dr.web to stfu.

RIP

2007-2008