19 thoughts on - Bounced Email Processing

• what do you want to do DO with these bounced mails?

  Email packages like Mailman have bounce handlers built into them, too many bounces in a given interval and they disable the subscription.

• From: John R Pierce Sent: November 4, 2014 16:53

  Our application software generates emails on behalf of our clients. Currently I have to manually processes any bounce messages which is a real waste of my time. I would like to be able to intercept the bounce messages and provide a summary of these to our application which could then notify the appropriate client (or at the very least make a note of the bounce).

  The bounceHammer package appears to do this but I would then need to figure out how to either read or convert their database (YAML/JSON).

  TIA

  Regards, Hugh

• what language is your application written in? most modern programming environments have classes for importing JSON into structures/objects, or for parsing it.

• El 04/11/2014 07:49 p.m., Hugh E Cruickshank escribi

• From: John R Pierce Sent: November 4, 2014 18:14

  It is written in OpenEdge ABL (AKA PROGRESS 4GL) and WebSpeed and I am sure it will be able to read the data I just have to figure out how.

  Regards, Hugh

• From: F. Mendez Sent: November 4, 2014 19:11

  That was the way I was leaning based on the little research I have done so far. The confirmation is appreciated.

  Regards, Hugh

• From: Hugh E Cruickshank

  If you just need something “simple” and know a bit php, you could try…

  –

• From: Reindl Harald Sent: November 5, 2014 01:22

  That would only be effective for bounce messages that were generated by our mail server (in the case of messages that were immediately rejected by the foreign mail server when our mail server attempted to hand the messages off). It would not work for messages that were initially accepted for delivery but were subsequently returned as being non-deliverable.

  It is on my list of “things to do” to extract the maillog entries for any application generated emails. We currently log the dialog between our application and our email server when delivery of the message is initiated however we are missing the handoff from our mail server to the foreign mail server. The maillog information would then be recorded in our database for use by our support staff and possibly client staff
  (although the client access part is still under consideration).

  Regards, Hugh

• Are there still servers that accept undeliverable mail and generate messages later? That behavior makes them an easy target for spammers who send the real target address as the From: entry and will likely get them blacklisted.

  I’d expect the bulk of failures to be there, but your own server should generate and deliver the bounce along with logging it.

• Indeed, there are, and this sort of spam is called “backscatter”. No need to mention that like almost everybody else I have my servers configured so that before deciding to accept message for delivery the server queries next server if further forwarding is involved, and depending on answer
  (deliverable/not deliverable) accepts or rejects message. This way we, even when handling forwards, will not become source of backscatter. I do have do make exemptions and if next server “lies” (says deliverable, then when message is passed to it it is accepted, but later server sends non delivery response), then I never let forwarding to these servers/domains. Even for real users who moved there. Period. I had an interesting comment from my friend about one of my exceptions. This exception is gmail.com
  (who at least at some point were accepting everything, then were sending you message: “user doesn’t exist”). His comment was: hey, they are in business of collecting information. Of course they accept everything. And once they have the information, then they treat it as an e-mail message
  ;-)

  Valeri

  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
  Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
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• I once ran qmail as shipped in SME server (before they replaced the receiving component) and it would routinely get hit by dictionary attacks – which it would accept and then fall over as it filled its outbound queue with bounces. That list of ‘accepted’ email addresses must have been sold and reused for years because the affected domain continued to get about 50k/day of emails to those non-existing users until the domain name was retired (for other reasons). I switched it to sendmail with a virtual user table for the few real user names so it was able to reject the bad names almost instantly.

  So, based on that, I’d guess you are on some of those lists that still get used.

  Well, you did mention something that could be construed as violent –
  by someone with a complete lack of a sense of humor.

• From: John Doe Sent: November 5, 2014 01:51

  The bit I know is what PHP stands for after that not so much.

  If I understand your example it appears to be retrieving emails from the mail server. I am still going to have to determine which messages are bounce messages then decipher the format and attempt to extract the relevant information from the message. If I have to resort to that then I might as well write it within our application software. But thanks for the suggestion.

  Regards, Hugh

• From: Les Mikesell Sent: November 5, 2014 05:40

  There definitely are judging by the number of bounce messages we receive hours and sometimes days later for messages that have not been queued in our mail server.

  Regards, Hugh

• http://lists.CentOS.org/pipermail/CentOS/2014-October/146720.html

  –keith

• Did he really have to put the tags on for you?

• Of course not. It’s still inappropriate content (IMO of course), and possibly the content that contributed to him being moderated by the list admins.

  It’s also inappropriate (IMO of course) to intentionally circumvent controls which have been implemented to restrict someone from posting to the list.

  –keith

• …{ About Mark being banned from the CentOS mailing list} …

  It was a conspicuously sarcastic remark. Definitely not a remark threatening anyone with violence.

  I do not know anyone who would agree with Keith’s assertion that Mark posted “something that could be construed as violent”.

  My personal interpretation is Mark wanted the Systemd genii to have a long holiday, away from the Red Hat/CentOS world, in a place where the possession of Red Hat/CentOS is banned by the USA government. Perhaps Mark should have selected another place, like North Korea for instance ?

  Can we become one big Happy Family again ?

• If the posting is a pertinent technical question then I submit that it is unethical not to circumvent the restriction. This is a technical forum and if there is no possibility of said posting being off-topic or intended to be unpleasant then it should be seen and answered if at all possible.

  Banning from a mailing list is just a rather ham-fisted way of saying that the job of moderating an individual disruptive user is deemed too burdensome. And, having moderated lists myself, I can sympathize with that position. But if other, un-banned, list members are willing to judiciously moderate said individual on a case by case basis then I see no difficulty at all.

• James B. Byrne писал 2014-11-06 16:58:

  You’re making too much of a hassle about a person I don’t consider exceptionally polite to other list members. Please keep this discussion off list if at all possible. TIA.