Like Nick I have been on the receiving end of this, and I can tell
you that some systems seem to go to incredible lengths to disguise
who a bounce message is associated with.
qmail has taken an interesting approach to this, which only works if
you deliver all recipients separately from the exploder, which is one
approach if you believe that bandwidth is cheap and plentiful and
that latency (and maybe recipient audit trail) is all important [yes
I know this over simplifies]. Basically each recipient of each
mailing list also has a unique sender address on the exploder system,
so you can tell who a bounce is associated with by the address the
bounce is sent to (unless you are dealing with a far end mailer that
is so primative/broken that it cannot cope with enverlope sender
addresses and sends things to the From: address or Reply-To: address
- and there are too many of these systems on the internet - probably
most of them supplied by either DEC or microsoft, but that probably
is a nasty slur!).
Some systems reply in a format which is supposed to be listserv
friendly - I guess that is documented somewhere - but have never seen
it.
Qmail (again - you must admit that it is full of good ideas) has
error replies in a format which Dan was, I believe, putting forward
as a draft RFC. Docs are within qmail.
I find smail's error messages to be obtuse!
Ideally I would like to have something that is generally acceptable
to be machine read, along with a good clear english (or other
appropriate language) message which will hopefully stop the
criminally ignorant who are convinced that no matter how "hard" the
error if you keep sending the message someone will deliver it for
them. [Metheringham's second law is that the probability of
misaddressing a mail message is proportional to the size of the
message *unless* the sender is a sales person in which case the
probability of misaddressing a mail message is proportional to the
square of the size of the message]
I guess that looking in the comp.mail.list-admin groups may reveal
something of use...
Nigel.
--
[ Nigel.Metheringham@??? - Unix Applications Engineer ]
[ *Views expressed here are personal and not supported by PLAnet* ]
[ PLAnet Online : The White House Tel : +44 113 251 6012 ]
[ Melbourne Street, Leeds LS2 7PS UK. Fax : +44 113 2345656 ]
