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Designing a bounce back manager. Need some help

Posted: Wed Feb 07, 2007 4:16 am
by Kadanis
Hope this is in the right forum. Its not really a coding question, more how to accomplish something whether through code / server settings / third party solutions...

I am currently working on an email marketing product (not spam, all private users and legitimate lists). The issue is that our clients want to be able to send from their domains, but the MTA is hosted on ours.

If we send an email from their address via our server, then the soft bouncebacks / out of office replys etc return to their address and the hard bounces (permanent faliures) to the postmaster@localhost.

In order to attempt to get all bounce traffic returning to our server, we started sending from our own address, but clients don't like that so much and it also causes a potential spam issue, where a lot of mail is coming from the same address.

Having researched into other providers in the same field, some appear to have it licked, where they send from the clients exact address (not masked, as far as I can tell), but the bounces return to their server and can then be quantified and reported.

We are attempting to recreate this functionality, but I have to admit that I am stumped.

Any suggestions would be great.

Current set up:
OS - Fedora Core 4
Application - PHP 4
DB - MySQL
MTA - Exim 4

Posted: Wed Feb 07, 2007 4:04 pm
by Kieran Huggins
Does swiftmailer handle bounces?

The alternative would be to use the IMAP functions in PHP to poll the mailbox periodically, searching individual messages for "bounce" text. You could do this with a cron job.