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Re: Catching bounces/delivery errors

2003-08-27 14:15:50
At 15:14 2003-08-27 -0400, DZ-Jay wrote:
Hum... As I explained in a previous post, what my organization does is not a traditional mailing list like this one,

A mailing list needn't be a two-way medium - a majordomo/mailman/whatever list can be configured for OUTBOUND only messages.

its personalized advertising campaigns sent to our customers (strictly opt-in, by the way.)

That calls for running a script that constructs a message from a template and the provided data.

Our customer e-mail list reside in our enterprise commerce server's database and whenver we are going to mail, we export the most current list of addresses based on some sales or demographic criteria and feed it to a comercial bulk e-mailer, which sends a personalized e-mail to the clients.

If you're sending the addresses out to a third party (hopefully bonded, etc), then THEY should deal with this problem.

If you're exporting the addresses to a commercial program to do the mailing, then IT should deal with this problem. I don't know what you paid for the commercial program to do this, but if it isn't managing the bounces, then it's crap and probably targeted at spammers.

If your "commerce server" database is SQL, then the mailing script itself could make the queries, and compose the messages. The procmail front-end on the bounce address alias could deal with passing the message to a (perl/etc) script to take the encoded return address, look up the appropriate record via SQL, and flag it as bounced.

If you think mailman can broadcast personalized messages and allow an address list to be imported and also provide a list of addresses that failed, then I'll try it. But I was under the impression that mailman would not work for this.

I can't tell you the extents of what mailman can or cannot do since I don't manage any lists with it - I participate on lists which utilize it, and the return-path is quite obviously encoded, and the purpose of that is well understood.

---
 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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