[ZendTo] Re: How to handle bounces

[Alexander Fisher]

On 23 March 2012 13:15, Jules <Jules at zend.to> wrote:
>
>
> On 23/03/2012 12:41, Alexander Fisher wrote:
>>> I have no control whatsoever over the content of the bounce message. It
>>> is generated by the MTA (Postfix or whatever). You *may* find that
>>> Postfix allows you to customise the contents of the bounce message to a
>>> certain extent, but you would have to dig through the Postfix docs to
>>> see if that is possible.
>>>
>>> Jules.
>> I appreciate that the bounce is generated by postfix, it's just a
>> shame that gmail's anti-spam system has 1. decided it looks like a
>> bounce message and 2. decided it's spam because there's no outgoing
>> message from gmail that it'd be a bounce for.  At least I think that's
>> what they're doing.
>>
>> This is really unfortunate, because for us at least, we were probably
>> better off before when all the bounces were delivered to me.  At least
>> in this situation, I would see the bounce, recognise the fact that a
>> customer had mistyped one of our user's email address and could
>> manually get in touch with them to say try again.  On the other hand,
>> for a large organisation where this would be impractical, the change
>> is probably an improvement.
>>
>> I suppose there might be a cleverer way of handling bounces.  Perhaps
>> a procmail script on the zendto server could process the bounce
>> somehow and do something more funky...
> Due to the wide variety of formatting of bounce messages generated by
> all the different email systems in the world, doing anything automatic
> is way beyond the scope of a system such as ZendTo. Google have tens of
> thousands of employees, which gives them the time to do things like this.
>> I imagine such a system could work better, but would undoubtedly
>> involve more than just a single line of code. :)
> Indeed!

If some sort of tracking id was inserted into either the subject or
body of the outgoing email, they should be somewhere in the bounce
regardless of format shouldn't they?  Or is even that too unreliable?
Anyway... probably too much work either way (although I might have a
go at some proof of concept code if I get a free afternoon sometime
soon) :)

With regard to the less drastic one liner mod, if you're going to
incorporate it into future releases, perhaps it could be made
configurable?
Preferably, I'd have the option to set the from address automatically
when sending from internal to external users, but could disable this
behaviour for email originating from outside users.

Kind Regards,
Alex