Handling Returned Mail Automatically

[Anon]

I'm looking for a solution to handling returned mail automatically with PHP.

We have a mailing list of about 20-25,000 people (no, we are <B>not</B> spammers) for our website to send out semi-weekly updates. We get a LOT of returned mail from people -- some are for full mailboxes, others for invalid accounts, and some for out-of-office messages, etc.

I'm looking for a way to pipe returned mail to a separate account that would be "managed" by a PHP program. Perhaps this program could parse the incoming emails for email addresses and compare to our database. When it finds a match, that email would have a numeric flag increased on it, so that after X number of returned emails we no longer send any messages to that address.

Does that make sense?

Anyone have any ideas on how to go about this? The main part that I need to understand how to do it to get PHP to handle the email. I've piped email to CGI programs before, but never to PHP, so I just need to know how to get started.

Thanks in advance for any help...

• Brad

[nashirak]

I dont think you want PHP to do this. I guess you could jery-rig something if you have PHP compiled as a CGI module (ie you can run it from the command line). Easy solution:

If you have an *nix type enviroment try using procmail... it will parse out incoming emails and find out if they have been returned or not. Among other things. 🙂

[Anon]

to direct messages returned to another address, simply define the from: field accordingly.

Use a cron initiated php script to connect to that mailbox (imap_*) and check the email they bounced back from - insert / update the db with a count for that email.

run a second script to open db connection periodally and check for returned messages from a particular address which exceed an 'x' number. Remove them from your email-db pool.