Mike,

If procmail is available on your server you may want to check
that out.  It will let you run rules against incoming messages
and then decide what to do with them.  If you used this over 
time and were religious about putting in a new rule after you
saw a new message from the various mail servers.

Note that if setup right you can use procmail to kick off process
to run against the mail so that you can parse out whatever information
for the action which needs to be taken....good stuff!

	Jay

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hwg-techniques(at)hwg.org [mailto:owner-hwg-techniques(at)hwg.org]
On Behalf Of Mike Taylor
Sent: Wednesday, July 17, 2002 9:33 PM
To: hwg-techniques(at)hwg.org
Subject: 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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