Your complaints contradict each other.

An atmosphere where people only dare offer concrete answers to the literal question asked is one where programmers will not improve themselves. However if you allow people to try to help each other and improve themselves, then by definition they will try to offer wisdom. That wisdom may or may not be the literal answer originally requested. So which do you prefer? That people try to give the best advice that they can, or that people deliberately let others not improve?

Furthermore you seem to be missing basic cause and effect. To the extent that this is a shrine of elite programming gods (not very much, but bear with me) that is because the people who have been here for a while have done a lot of helping each other and improving themselves. Think about it. If interacting in this forum results in real improvement, then people here are going to become a lot better than average.

And let me explain why this matters. A big part of being a decent programmer is understanding the design of things well enough to select clean approaches to problems. And a large part of that is knowing what you should do yourself versus what should be delegated to someone (or something) else and why. Yes you can do that but you don't want to, and here is why.. is a useful response to someone who is trying to improve.

OK, so you aren't a server administrator. But you want to do something that is normally done by server administrators. Therefore you should learn something about the considerations that they have.

Finally you are mischaracterizing your answers. At the moment, here is what I see for your original question:

• An answer that says how you can do it in Perl, pointing out that it is a PITA to set up, and giving detailed instructions for how to do it in sendmail. (ie You got your answer, and a bit extra.)
• An answer that points out the problems caused by having extra bounces.
• A comment that says to read documentation for your MTA. In case it is not obvious to you, Abigail-II's answer refers to the fact that with many MTAs, users can write their own scripts to dynamically handle mail. Those scripts are often written in Perl, and your question didn't specify enough context to say whether or not that was the kind of script that you were writing. So despite talking about an MTA, this is a direct answer to what you might have meant.
• You got an explanation of why it is a bad design to send bounce messages from out of an MTA.
• You got pointed to Mail::Audit as well as a comment that you shouldn't be bouncing. Mail::Audit is meant to integrate into a mailserver and take care of the mechanics of sending the bounce etc for the programmer - in other words that is an answer.
• You got an explanation of why it is better to reject rather than bounce. Perhaps you don't care whether you are adding to the spam problem. But if you don't care about others, then why should anyone else care about you?

So several answers answered variations of your question directly. All provided good information. It is up to you to choose whether or not to get off your high horse and take value from it.

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