pulling out email addresses

[Douglas Furlong]

On Mon, 2003-12-29 at 20:41, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Mon, 29 Dec 2003 14:37:20 -0500, Mark Haney wrote:
> 
> > I work for an email marketing company that deal directly with physicians 
> > and consumers (no NOT spam) but what I'm looking for is a tool that will 
> > handle the bounces, pull the email address that bounced and dump it into a 
> > text file for dumping into a database so that we don't keep sending to 
> > dead accounts.  I'd prefer a windows version as we are an all Windows 
> > shop, but a linux version would get it in the door here which I'm dying to 
> > do.  Any help would be appreciated.
> 
> procmail plus formail and a helper script written in your favourite
> scripting language should do. Shouldn't be a hard job to analyze
> MAILER-DAEMON return messages on whether they are about fatal delivery
> errors.
I have a little experience with regards to bounced email, working out if
it is a transient error message (over quota, on holiday), or whether it
is a permanent failure (over quota, left the company, user/domain does
not exist).

Unfortunately the number of different mail servers AND configurations of
said mail servers is quite astounding. To be honest the best two servers
to deal with are Sendmail and Exchange. The error messages provided by
these two mail servers are relatively consistent (may be because
sendmail admins appreciate consistency, and exchange admins don't know
any better ;)).

So the biggest problem your going to have is to work out whether or not
the response is a fatal error, or one of the other ones. If you are
happy with doing that, then some thing as simple as a shell script could
be run on a specific mail box, or listed as the mail alias, so that it
is processed as it came in to the mail system.

Dougie