Removing Bounced Mails

How To?

[MrSpeed]

I have a mailing list program that I basically wrote myself in Perl. There is no list management to speak of beyond adding and removal of addresses.

It appears I am clogging up my mqueue with bounced e-mails and other dirt in the list.

I know some mailing list prorams looked for addresses that have bounced for 3 times and then removes the address from the list.

Is there some program I can get to clean up my list without replacing my existing mailing list program?

Free is a very good price.

[wruk999]

have you had a look through:

hotscripts.com or
sourceforge.net

hotscripts do have a lot of pre-made scripts, but also tips & tutorials which could help.
i don't use sourceforge as much, but it does have a _huge_ amount scripts.

Hope this helps,

Regards,
William.

[Thermopylae]

Mr. Speed,
I to have a similar quandary. Essentially all thats needed is for some layer on top of qmail (or whatever server you use) to be able to make a system call and run a script, passing in the bounced (invalid) E-Mail.

I have noticed that a number of MLM's support this, but, unfortunately, my case requires something far more customized than a Mailing List Manager can provide.

If anyone has any specific ideas on how or what to use to allow such bounce detection, I would be very grateful.

Thanks.

[MrSpeed]

wruk999 -
I'll check those places out. I do visit there for ASP stuff but it skipped my mind for the Unix/Perl world.

[TheWebographer]

I used PHP and its IMAP fuctions to write a neat little bounced email script.

When the daily headlines are sent out to registered subscribers invariably a dozen or so bounce. I redirect these bounces to a special mailbox.

The PHP script stores the id's of these bounces in a database by date. If a certain email address bounces for over a week then I figure it is a bad address. I press a button and Poof that address is deleted from our daily email list.

By the simple press of a button I can also delete the bounced emails on the server.

Works slick.

[MrSpeed]

I redirect these bounces to a special mailbox.

How do you do that? Is it based on the reply to address or is it a server setting?

[TheWebographer]

I put the mysql id on the bottom of each email sent out, in an inconspicuous place. When the email bounces it goes into a special email box.

I periodically parse these emails and extract the id's using regex. I grab the date from the headers and store this info in a table.

I then use this table to make a graphical display by date of all of our bounced emails. It is then a simple matter to make buttons to either remove the id from the list (the mail to this address is no longer bouncing) or to delete the id from the list (the mail has bounced, say, for a week in a row and I assume the address is not longer good).

[andreasfriedrich]

A .procmailrc file like the one below will run a sortmail script for each mail that is sent to the user in whose home directory the .procmailrc file sits.

:0 
¦ "/usr/bin/sortmail" $1 

Using Mail::Audit [search.cpan.org] manipulating and sorting mail is as easy as writing a simple Perl [perl.com] script.

Andreas