On Fri, 2004-01-09 at 11:03, Douglas Furlong wrote:
Unfortunately the number of different mail servers AND configurations
of
said mail servers is quite astounding. To be honest the best two servers
to deal with are Sendmail and Exchange. The error messages provided by
these two mail servers are relatively consistent (may be because
sendmail admins appreciate consistency, and exchange admins don't know
any better ;)).
So the biggest problem your going to have is to work out whether or not
the response is a fatal error, or one of the other ones. If you are
happy with doing that, then some thing as simple as a shell script could
be run on a specific mail box, or listed as the mail alias, so that it
is processed as it came in to the mail system.
Dougie
RFC 2821 (also see RFC 821) specify response codes for MTA's. To some
degree, these codes are fixed (top level codes, i.e. 550). Sub-level
codes are implementation specific which means they could (and do) vary
from MTA to MTA.
The response codes are included in any bounce message, you should be
able to determine (at a minimum) whether they response was a temporary
or permanent failure.