Unsubscribing bounced messages

[Anon]

Hi All,

I am modifying a PHP based mailing list program. It's going well, with the subscribe / unsubscribe and sending function all working well and now handling a list of over 14,000 users.

My next feature was to be an automatic unsubscribe function for bounced addresses. I've noticed a few programs that do this and have not been able to work out a good way to go about it.

Has anyone tackled this sort of problem before. Any tips or pointers in the right direction are appreciated.

-andre

[Anon]

Have a separate e-mail address in the reply-to field that your program logs into and checks. Delete all the "To" fields from this, and you're good to go.

[Anon]

Not all mailers seem to take notice of the 'Reply-To' header and instead bounce messages back to the sender - what to do in this case? AND, the from address is no longer who the message was sent to, but is instead the SMTP servers address (ie. [e-mail])

I was hoping that I could use an 'Errors-To' header, but I can't find any information on how it is handled by SMTP servers - and the problem then of course is the return address.

The other option is to embedd some code in the subject, which could then be used to remove the user from the database, but again, not all mailers seem to return the subject intact.

So, I'm still perplexed.