Re: [Exim] AOL Feedback loop TOS Notifications

On Tue, May 25, 2004 at 02:25:58PM +0100, Matthew Byng-Maddick said:
> On Tue, May 25, 2004 at 04:40:34PM +0530, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
> > Genie Livingstone wrote:
> > >Has anyone seen exim filter that would somewhat encode recipient email
> > >address and add it to the headers? The address needs to be encoded
> > >otherwise AOL will strip it, their privacy policy and TOS feedback look
> > this is a function of your list manager - a well documented funtion
> > called VERP
>
> This won't necessarily help you, because they may well be spotting verp-ed
> addresses (I don't know the details of AOL), and the message isn't bouncing,
> it's being reported to AOL as spam. I'm fed up with lusers who report things
> as spam instead of unsubscribing, though. I get the odd few on lists I run.
>
> It's probably easier to add a header which munges all information about the
> email address (eg, by encrypting it), so that it's not even findable as an
> email address.

We use a form of verp where we have the bounce address like:
mlist-1433n@???.

This passes one of the spamassassin test for ID's that end in a number,
and is easy for exim to handle. The number is an index into the DB. We
use a DB for a number of reasons... It let's us track how many bounces a
user has had over a period of time, which lists a user is subscribed to,
etc. None of the standard list handling software really worked well for
us, so we wrote our own that's integrated into our application.