Re: Catching bounces/delivery errors
2003-08-26 09:42:43
On Tue, 26 Aug 2003 07:38:02 -0700, Professional Software Engineering <PSE-
L(_at_)mail(_dot_)professional(_dot_)org> wrote:
At 09:55 2003-08-26 -0400, DZ-Jay wrote:
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.
This might not help us, as I have no access to the mailing address list.
Also, as you mentioned, there are a lot of braindead servers out there that
send their bounces to the *wrong* address (ignoring the Return-Path and
using the From: header address.)
WHY isn't so much of a concern for most people managing lists, so long as
addresses which bounce frequently get tossed.
Well, I need to know the *why* because I need to remove unknown addresses
while ignoring notices like "mailbox is full" or "will try in xx hours
again.".
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.
Oh, I know this already, but at the moment these messages are being
processed *MANUALLY* by some monkey here at the office (don't ask me! I am
recently new here and it was my suggestion to automate the system). This
person opens thousands of e-mails that bounced and sorts them by reason,
then manually creates lists of e-mail addresses that should be removed from
our database. He also tries to apply some reasoning to the process by
identifying typos in e-mail addresses and correcting them (i.e.: a0l.com
instead of aol.com, eathlink instead of earthlink, verison instead of
verizon, etc.) This process I will automate in a program I am writing to
do this whole thing -- but first I need to identify this messages whent
they arrive and put them in a specific mailbox/file, for later processing.
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.
For the moment I just need to identify that an incoming message is a
notification of failure, that's all. Nothing "perfect" but a recipe that
catches as many as possible.
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.
My organization already sends personalized messages, one at a time per
recipient, but they all use the same return path, which as I mentioned
above, might be ignored by a lot of servers.
TIA
dZ.
--
DZ: Hating anything, everything and everyone since 1994.
_______________________________________________
procmail mailing list
procmail(_at_)lists(_dot_)RWTH-Aachen(_dot_)DE
http://MailMan.RWTH-Aachen.DE/mailman/listinfo/procmail
|
|