At 09:55 2003-08-26 -0400, DZ-Jay wrote:
Does anybody have a recipe for catching delivery errors? My
organization sends bulk e-mail to our list subscribers (not spam!) and
sometimes some messages bounce for different reasons. I need to
mechanically sort them, parse them and extract the failed addresses, but
that's another war.
You might look at using a list processor that sets unique return-path
values for each sent message, making it easy to track which addresses
bounced. WHY isn't so much of a concern for most people managing lists, so
long as addresses which bounce frequently get tossed.
If you do not utilize such a mechanism, and expect to get addresses from
the bounces themselves, you'll soon discover that there are MANY cheezy
mail servers out there which return mail without the slightest hint as to
who it was received for. And there are forwarding services that do this as
well, etc.
I'm sure I can build from these but if someone already has one ready,
better! :)
The one I have is part of a support script for the Majorodomo listserve
package, though the bounces it handles are not specific to majordomo. It
doens't even attempt to identify what the delivery address was for the
bounced user, but rather the basic cause of the bounce (MBFULL, HARDBOUNCE,
DELAY, MAILBLOCK, etc). It doesn't get 100% of them, but does a good job
of about 96% or more of the bounces.
A drawback with the personalized return address method of tracking bounces
is that it means that EVERY message through your list is sent per-recipient
back out - normally, if you have 100 subscribers at XYZ corp, ONE message
will be sent to the XYZ Corp mailserver - but with tracked bounces, EACH of
those recipients will be delivered a separate copy of the message by your
mailserver.
---
Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering
Procmail disclaimer: <http://www.professional.org/procmail/disclaimer.html>
Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies. I'll get my copy from the list.
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