On Wed, Nov 5, 2014 at 3:55 AM, Hugh E Cruickshank hugh@forsoft.com wrote:
just parse the *maillog* instead
That would only be effective for bounce messages that were generated by our mail server (in the case of messages that were immediately rejected by the foreign mail server when our mail server attempted to hand the messages off). It would not work for messages that were initially accepted for delivery but were subsequently returned as being non-deliverable.
Are there still servers that accept undeliverable mail and generate messages later? That behavior makes them an easy target for spammers who send the real target address as the From: entry and will likely get them blacklisted.
It is on my list of "things to do" to extract the maillog entries for any application generated emails.
I'd expect the bulk of failures to be there, but your own server should generate and deliver the bounce along with logging it.