sendmail and bounced mail

eweaverp has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

How do I call sendmail so that bounced mail is ignored? As is my script (code follows) returns bounced messages to the username the script is run under, i.e., me. I'd prefer to stick them somewhere in a flat file or ignore them instead of cluttering my personal inbox. I've looked into some sendmail flags, but things like -oeq don't seem to work. Thanks

~evan

Comment on sendmail and bounced mail

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Re: sendmail and bounced mail by fokat (Deacon) on Jun 15, 2003 at 00:10 UTC
The standard way to achieve this, is to add a header such as... Errors-To: nobody@some.where.far.far.far.away Where the email address you supply, should be a blackhole. Many sites maintain a `nobody@site` address for that purpose. Ask your friendly `postmaster` about this. By looking at your sample code, you might also want to add a header such as... Reply-To: nobody@site Best regards -lem, but some call me fokat	[reply]
Re: sendmail and bounced mail by sgifford (Prior) on Jun 15, 2003 at 20:30 UTC
You want to use sendmail's `-f` flag. That will specify the email address where bounced mail should be returned to. If you want bounces to go into a flat file, set up an alias for that address to go to a flat file. If you want to discard bounces, set up an alias for that address to go to /dev/null. You can also use `-f ''` to ask the mail system not to generate bounces at all.	[reply]