I faced a similar problem w/ a web site's mailing list for which I was responsible. This was sending out tens of thousands of emails weekly. One of the biggest hassles was distinguishing bounces from full mailboxes/downed servers from those who had cancelled their accounts or had them deactivated.

This was on a Windoze environment with an Exchange server. I spent days trying to come up with an effective way to collect, parse and act upon the bounces when suddenly, in a zen-like moment of enlightenment, it occurred to me that I could just parse the web server's SMTP logs. About eight hours later (yeah, I'm slow), I had a Perl script that worked like a charm.

I ended up doing an end-run around the problem with trying to distinguish temporary failures from more permanant ones, though. It was still pretty difficult to distinguish even with the SMTP logs. My solution was to parse the logs for the previous four weeks, and if four failures in different weeks were found for a given email address, they were removed from the mailing list. This seemed to adequately cover temporary problems.

Hanlon's Razor - "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"

In reply to Re: email bouncebacks by Art_XIV
in thread email bouncebacks by jalspach

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