Hi Philip,
Thanks for your reply. The billing software runs on a Windows box so there isn't much chance of any intelligent quality checking there. I think another option may be to try and get a daily export of the email addresses and run those through a script as you suggested. I will consult the people who drive the Window boxes and see if they can provide me with a text file to run quality tests on.
Thanks
Clint
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Philip Hazel [mailto:ph10@cus.cam.ac.uk]
> Sent: 08 August 2003 11:00
> To: Clint Sim
> Cc: exim-users@???
> Subject: Re: [Exim] Dealing with retarded mail software
>
>
> On Fri, 8 Aug 2003, Clint Sim wrote:
>
> > When Prism does it's billing run and tries to send to that
> malformed
> > address, Exim (quite correctly) returns a "501 domain missing or
> > malformed", at which point Prism's billing run just stops and sits
> > there looking dumb (not quite so clever!). Using SMTP rewrite rules
> > and strip_trailing_dot I have gotten around some of the bad
> addresses
> > but it's not possible to consider every possible way that the staff
> > may enter email addresses incorrectly. What I would like to
> be able to
> > do is to accept a malformed address and it's mail and then
> bounce it
> > after that as an undeliverable/unrouteable address, instead
> of at RCPT
> > time.
>
> Exim won't accept syntactically malformed addresses at RCPT
> time. Why not? Well, if they are syntactically malformed, it
> cannot parse them into local part and domain, and so it can't
> make any kind of attempt at delivery or any other kind of handling.
>
> You have already found the existing features that enable
> certain forms of malformed addresses to be be recognised and
> transformed into valid addresses. I'm afraid that's all that
> is possible. If you could write a regex to recognize valid
> formats, that could be used. However, this could be a
> difficult task, even with the fancy features available in the
> current regex engine.
>
> Is there any way you can get the addresses validated, at
> least for syntax, in advance? For example, when they are
> entered, pass them through some script that runs "exim -bt"
> on them, and analyses the response?
>
>
>
> --
> Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
> ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
> Get the Exim 4 book: http://www.uit.co.uk/exim-book
>
>
>
