On Wed, 20 Jun 2001, Professional Software Engineering wrote:
At 17:58 2001-06-20 +0200, Jeroen Reynders wrote:
Question:
How can I filter the body for a e-mail address so that if we get a bounced
email back we can send the email address of the user to a external
program?
This is nearly impossible:
* There really isn't a standard format for bounce messages, though
the bounces that sendmail produces would, by the merit of it having been
the largest MTA, probably be considered as an unofficial standard of sorts.
Yes I have noticed that, when trying to find some strongpoints by
searching thru the RFC's.
* Many corporate mail servers don't adhere to anything resembling
a standard -- some don't even identify what address they're bouncing on.
Yep.. Totally agree..
* Some users will have forwarding services -- so the address they
provided to you may be valid, but the mailbox that it forwards to might not
be. If you get a bounce from one of these, and manage to extract an
address, it will not be the address that was provided to you.
The most successfull form of automated bounce handling is when the sent
message has a return address which is unique to the recipient. That way,
if their server bounces it (even if it is a forward), it should come back
to you at an address which can then be used to determine what address it
had been sent to - then, short of possibly scanning the message body for a
reason, you can pretty much ignore the message body.
Oke that is a good idea. We actually already have a domain for this. But
we didn't implement it like the way you are suggesting... hmmm.. thankx..
Of course, not all MTAs follow the rules, and as such, they sometimes send
bounces to the wrong address from the headers. Those bounces will have to
be handled manually. They should be a smaller portion of the total however.
Well we expect to grow to 90.000 customers next year so... we will try
anything.
To deal with morons who cannot enter their own email address correctly (you
must have a lot of AOL and MSN users? <g>),
Hahha.. yes we have... sometimes I wonder if theire is anything else
left..
your subscription process
should include a step where the user emails an acknowledgement code to a
specific address at your service. That could pair up their actual address
with the one they're providing. Nine times out of ten, even a moron will
have their email client set up properly (though it's been known to happen
that they'll botch that). You could instead mail them a message they must
reply to (thus demonstrating they're receiving the message and not just
capable of sending from the account), and check for bounces on THAT message
too.
Oke, we did something like this, but we ran into some time-scale problems
with some clients. If we find the time, which we find soon we could
implement it.
:0 B
* ^To: *\/(_dot_)*(_at_)?(_dot_)*
| echo $MATCH >> test_date_filter
Although you're piping to an echo, you're eventually outputting to a file,
so you should add a lockfile flag (:) to the flags line.
Sorry typist- mistake..
I ran this against a folder of known bounces, and it seemed to do pretty
well -- so long as the headers of the bounced message appeared within the
bounce, and the To: of the bounced message was the address in question (I
imagine the latter will hold true for your purposes, though it often
doesn't for others).
Yes youre right, I have talked to some colleague's here. And what we are
planning to do is to gather all bounces build a database from it and from
that we are going to generate regular expressions. We did that before
already and it worked very, very good. But I never expected we were going
to use it with procmail.
Thank you for taking the time to answer my question you gave me some new
idea's, I coulndt have asked for more..
---
Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering
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