On Tue, 21 May 2002, Professional Software Engineering wrote:
At 13:07 2002-05-21 -0700, Teddy Campbell did say:
What would be the best way to catch emails that bounce? Heres
something similar to my situation.
Why not just describe _your_ situation?
Maybe to save us the story of his life?
cheezy solutions for MS Windows based systems - I'm not knocking MS
Windows, just the plethora of crap people choose to use on it). Some of
Why not? Just because it crashes alot, Win 2000 is actually NT 5 which
was promised to the faithful back in '94 or so, and since up to
Win 2000, Windoze was based on a dos specification intended for the 8 bit
computes of 1980, the consequences of which might actually translate into
stunting the growth of architecture.
Ensuring that your list rejects posts from non-subscribers is a good first
step in blocking such idiots. Adding loop checking (to ensure that a
Huh?
message which has already passed through your list isn't being sent back
into it, say by some braindead wannabe MTA that ignores the envelope data
Huh?
What some email list managers do is set the sender address to a unique hash
representing the subscribed address - when a message bounces (properly, but
not necessarily with useful info in the body), the address it was sent to
can be used to automatically determine the actual subscriber for that
bounce. Of course, this means that EVERY MESSAGE through your list will be
I have implented Qmail and it's VERP system a long time ago because it's
useful as my Smartlist delivery agent.
delivered as a UNIQUE message out to EACH RECIPIENT. Normally, if you
Yikes! You mean that might afford other functions such as mail-merge,
including the actual subscriber address incase of need of unsubscription,
and even database driven applications...
delivered a list message to 20,000 subscribers, 500 of which happened to
have hotmail accounts, there'd be ONE connection to the hotmail MX to
attempt delivery of the message to all of the subscribers there. That
So how many minutes does it take you to deliver to 20,000 subscribers?
makes the email exchange efficient - one copy of the message and a
buggerin' large list of envelope recipients. To uniquely hash each message
means that you'd have 500 message transactions with hotmail instead. Icko,
esp on large lists or those with lots of traffic.
If you want a _really_ efficient car, leave it parked in the driveway.
Now-a-days, in the year 2002, we have blue-haired old ladies ranging
the public Internet with 1.5ghz workstations to check their emails and
view pics of their grandkids, etc., and this is what is driving
the marketplace.
A few months ago, I wrote a collection of procmail scripts to work in
conjunction with several majordomo lists I'm involved with
Should we go check at the Majordomo site? I haven't checked it out
closely yet, but it is my understanding that the Mailman folks, who
btw create the software this mailing list is hosted on, have a library
of known bounce messages and scripts to parse and respond appropiately
to them. No doubt a tedious brute-force approach, but then so is
addressing the issues of email-based worms/virii.
listadmin insane. Likewise for some ISPs which insist on sending DSNs for
messages every four hours for a week because their customer's email is
handled over what must be a dialup...
/dev/null
--Paul
Cueman
--
William J. Broad: "The crux... is that the vast majority of the mass
of the universe seems to be missing."
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