bouncebacks and list management

Was curious if anyone has ever been handed the task of managing large
amounts of bounceback emails.  Suppose you would want to identify what type
of bounceback it was (i.e. invalid domain, user doesn't exist, etc.).  I
understand that MIME has certain types of reason codes that can somehow be
used to detect what type of bounceback it is.  Thus, it would seem that you
could develop a program that would read the bounceback email, extract the
headers that offer the reason code and then automatically handle the email
based on what type of error it is.

Unfortunately, I've also heard the because every server is different,
there's no guarantee that the returning mail will contain all the
information you need for your program to detect this reason code.

Has anyone had to handle bouncebacks in this fashion before?  If so, did you
go to an outside software package (perhaps suggest one offline)...or did you
write a program to achieve this?

Fortunately we are only in the hypothetical stage to determine if this can
even be done.  The easiest solution we have suggested was to have a program
that doesn't go so far as to detect the type of bounceback, but simply
detects that a particular email address has bounced and then delete that
address after it fails X number of times.  But if there's a way to actually
read the reason codes reliable across all server types, that would be ideal.

Thanks,
Mike

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