what about doing something like stick the error response as a header in the bounce message?
Obviously, we have no control over the content of another server's bounce messages, but see http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=18309, which proposes that James implement RFC 1894 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1894.txt).
Ah nice, yes exactly what I'm looking for. Seems like we'd only need to add another mime part to the bounce message. It would also be nice to have a parser for this RFC, but that wouldn't necessarily live within James server.
The motivation for this is to recognize soft bounces (mailbox full, mail servers down) from hard bounces
Servers should probably not be sending a bounce, or at least a non-RFC 1894 bounce, for a soft error. VERP seems to be somewhat predicated upon bounces being permanent, at least for that message. To work around the fact that the errors may relate to a transient mailbox error, it seems that VERP mailers will be tolerant of a configured number of bounces, and will then send an "warning message" to inform the user. If the warning bounces, the user is disconnected from the list. That seems to describe the behavior I've seen from ezmlm, but Brian (or perhaps some of our members) would know better.
To clarify some cases:
- no route to mail server, connection disconnected, etc..., those are temporary failures that result in delivery retries.
- your mailbox is full is a good example of a soft error (bounce sent).
- your mailbox does not exist is a hard error (bounce sent).
I agree that after a given # of soft errors, a hard error gets, just like after a given # of temporary failures, you'd get a soft error.
So really, looks like I need to understand RFC 1894. We did a mailing for a customer and got about 1700 bounces (most James), but I can scan the bounces for something that would appear in that mime part.
Thanks!
-- Serge Knystautas President Lokitech >> software . strategy . design >> http://www.lokitech.com/ p. 1.301.656.5501 e. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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