On Thu, May 17, 2007, Yonah Russ wrote about "Re: SMTP relay server": > I think the real question is this- bounced emails go to the address of the > sender. In a mailing list setup you should be able to set the address for
Indeed. This is a point worth remembering. It sounds like the original requester assumed that a "bounce" means that while the SMTP connection is going on, the receiver says "I will not accept this", and the sender therefore can add this address to the "bounced list". The problem is that it is very common for receivers to be behind a multitude of mail relays, proxies, forwarders, and so on, which means that your original send succeeds, but then a few minutes later you get a "bounce mail" from somewhere inside the receiver's system. This is a completely new mail, which your mail server gets to the "Sender: " address you specified, and some software should get that mail, and extract the bouncing address from it and add it to your database. It hardly makes any sense that the SMTP server do this processing - a very specialized software can and should do this processing. This processing is also more complex than might first appear, at least if you want to do it right: one bounce does NOT mean you should immediately strike out the person from your list. It might be a temporary bounce (e.g., the reciever had a temporary configuration or network problem), it might be a bounce of a specific mail (e.g., as suspected spam) but not of others, and so on. Many mailing list software have such bounce-analyzing components, and analyze the percentage of bounce, and verify the validity bounces (send a test mail and see if it bounces too, to prevent an attacker from faking a bounce and dropping you from a list you want to remain on). As I said, most mailing list software have a componant that does exactly this, and does it to varying degrees of automation (mailman is more automatic, majordomo is more manual). I am not aware of a separate software that does only bounce analysis, but maybe someone else on the list knows of such a thing. Of course, since mailman and friends are free software, you can always rip out the parts you want from it, without using the other parts. -- Nadav Har'El | Thursday, May 17 2007, 29 Iyyar 5767 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Tourist: Someone who goes 3,000 miles to http://nadav.harel.org.il |get a picture in front of his car. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
