procmail
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List owners' recipes?

1996-08-13 19:09:25
Hi.

I've recently jumped into the role of a "list owner" and am wondering
if anyone has developed good filters for handling mail "bounces".

For those not familiar with the problem, a "list owner" gets to deal
with all the dirty work of what to do when a mailing list message
cannot be delivered.  There are various types of problems; some
transient ("host not available"), some permanent (user no longer
exists -- but that in some cases, such as AOL, could be that he
just hasn't paid his bill!) so it's a "fuzzy logic" problem at
best, I think.

All these bounces get mailed back to the list owner.

There is a decision-making process, and it's "when do I unsubscribe
person X".

I can absolutely identify the "bounces" -- they come from a known
listserv address and all will match
        Subject: GS-L: error report
so the question is *NOT* how to identify these messages.
        :0:
        * From: <insert appropriate stuff>
        * Subject:.*gs-l: error report
will undoubtedly work fine.

What I'd like to do is put them into two folders, one which is
stuff I can probably ignore and sloppily delete, and the other is
stuff I should pay more attention to.  For now, none would go
straight to /dev/null.

I've gotten a couple dozen bounces from one user which are of the
transient variety -- but every post by anyone to the list gets me
another bounce 4 hours later.  A key here might be:
    **********************************************
    **      THIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY      **
    **  YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE  **
    **********************************************
as included text in the body.  I could match on that and toss it
into the "probably-can-ignore-these" folder.

Different hosts, however, seem to send out different stuff, and
if any list-owners are out there and have done such sorting using
procmail recipes, I'd appreciate input.

If anyone has recipes to handle such things, please write.
Otherwise, I'll start "building my own" but I will make what I come
up with available to others.  No point in inventing the wheel twice.

One more thing I'd like to do (but is probably not feasible) is
junk the body of the bounce.  The problem is that the body of
of the bounce message is more than the body of the originally posted
message, and it's only the latter that I'd like to strip out.
Any ideas are welcome.

I can provide sample bounces to anyone seriously interested, but
didn't want to post them here due to length.

Cheers,
Stan Ryckman (stanr(_at_)tiac(_dot_)net).

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