On Mon, Jul 12, 2004 at 02:20:12PM +0200, Tor Houghton wrote:
> So; we thought that one way of cutting down the human processing time of
> such messages would be to somehow record and check the bounced/undelivered
> message's ID. Perhaps this is old news, has been thought of before and was
> rejected as a bad idea.
I think you'll be lucky to find the original message ID in a bounce
message. You're already lucky if you can parse the intended
recipients from bounces let alone work out which message it
corresponds with.
To get around these problems, some mailing lists have adopted a
method to identify bounces more accurately - by rewriting the
apparant message sender so that bounces come back to special
addresses, eg:
exim-users+foo=bar.org@???
when the message is sent to foo@???. I'm not going to argue
whether this is foolproof and/or a good idea, but it demonstrates
why relying on the contents of bounce messages is unreliable.
--
Russell King
Linux kernel 2.6 ARM Linux - http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/
maintainer of: 2.6 PCMCIA - http://pcmcia.arm.linux.org.uk/
2.6 Serial core
