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Bounce Management

2001-01-25 02:50:17
We're having a bit of trouble managing our bounce situations when procmail
is used to forward mail to a remote host and/or copy mail into a mailbox
that is "over quota".

What can happen is the remote host's mailbox gets full, too, and then with
header additions, each successive mail gets larger and larger and
eventually, a postmaster has to do manual queue deletions of messages that
started out being 3-4KB and end up growing to over 1MB each.

The flow might go something like:
1. Mail comes in
2. procmailrc read
3. forward to remote address and copy to mailbox
4. local mailbox is full; bounce and return to sender
5. forward to remote address is bounced because either the forward
address' mailbox is full or the address is blocked
6. bounce due to full mailbox or bad address comes back and we repeat
steps 1-6

How can we craft a much more intelligent forward recipe such that this
endless bouncing doesn't happen more than 3-4 times?  I say 3-4 times
because there's a chance that the problem might fix itself with the user
getting a clue and downloading both their local and remote mailboxes.

Should we be adding headers each time mail is forwarded and perhaps
maintain a count that is incremented and then dumped if the count reaches
a certain limit?  Something like, if you see "X-Forwarded-To: <address>",
and <address> matches the destination, drop it?  Or, if "X-Bounce-Count:
<count>" reaches 5, drop it?

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