[Mailman-Developers] Fwd: Bounce action notification

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
> 
> On Tuesday, February 25, 2003, at 07:25  PM, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:
> 
>> Of course, Mailman can verp which takes the guesswork out of bounce
>> processing.  Even so, anything you can contribute to improve the
>> non-verp bounce detection stuff would be appreciated.
>>
> 
> that code's unfortunately not available.
> 
> But on a more general basis, I found a couple of techniques really 
> helped me here, against all but the most obnoxious bounce returns (i.e. 
> first class):
> 
> First, I now embed the user's email in the header in an X header, in two 
> ways. One as the address, but also as a hashed string (MD5 hash, et al). 
> I also use the hash in things like the unsubscribe links instead of the 
> email address, because I've found the email address can cause issues of 
> encoding on the way back, so you aren't always sure what to look for. 
> the hash doesn't cause encoding issues.

The hash idea sounds interesting, but how do you manage to convert
the hash back to an email address ?

I guess some simple email address mangling trick would give you
the same effect, e.g. base64 encoding:

 >>> print 'mm(' + base64.encodestring('mal at lemburg.com') + ')'
mm(bWFsQGxlbWJ1cmcuY29t)

These kind of encodings could even be used in URLs and survive
text->HTML->text conversion.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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