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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.


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