Some time around 8/27/2003 16:26:03, I think I heard Professional Software
Engineering say:
A mailing list needn't be a two-way medium - a majordomo/mailman/whatever
list can be configured for OUTBOUND only messages.
agreed.
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.
agreed.
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.
Bingo! But I didn't make the purchase, nor I am in control of it.
There have been talks of an in-house built solution, but that might be
next year. At the moment I was trying to use a bit of duct-tape to
relief some of the work done by the guy who handles the bounces
manually.
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.
Its not in SQL, its an HP3000 running Ecometry software. The DB is
some aberration called TurboView. I have no direct access to it. The
e-mail campaign guy is sent a flat file exported from the DB. He runs
his little spamming program and sends the messages. I got charge of
the SMTP server and I am trying to automate as much as I can. I will
feed the bounces to a perl script I am making, but I want procmail to
gather the bounces and feed them to it. My question to this list was
if someone already had a recipe for identifying bounces, apparently
not, so I'll make my own. Eventually I'll look into implementing a
*real* solution, but at the moment all I need to deal with is the
bounces. If anybody has suggestions on good software to handle e-mail
broadcasting, I'd appreciate it if you sent me a private e-mail.
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.
Yes, I know... I just wish it were that simple, but there's a lot of
braindead sysadmins out there who either configure their servers wrong
or run idiotic unconventional software that wants to return bounces to
the wrong address (Reply-To: or From: headers, for example), send bounce
messages from a non-standard address (i.e. "nobody-here(_at_)domain(_dot_)com"),
return a cutesie message instead of a formal failure notification, or
sometimes even return a failure notification without any indication of
the failed address. That said, I'll take a look at mailman and see
how it can fit into our process.
Thanx
dZ.
---
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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Hello,
-dZ.
--
:[ DZ vs. THE WORLD]==- -- - -
Hating anything, everything and everyone since 1996.
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