The problem is, we want to do a more global system, as we have tons of utilities sending out mail and all the bounced mail is landing in root, they have tons of old mail backed up. I'd like to build both a retroactive and a proactive solution but having problems doing so as nobodys mail server seems to be returning consistently formatted errors. I'm looking into the idea of seeing if sendmail can remote connect and validate but not having much luck. Someone suggested:

/usr/lib/sendmail -oeq -bv the@email.com;  echo $status
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but not returning much of anything useful :(