[Tutor] sORRY

[dman]

On Thu, Jan 17, 2002 at 01:19:10AM -0500, kirk Bailey wrote:
| someone on the GMbrianpenn list closed an account and did not tell us
| od come and do the wtright thing and unsubscribe. We jus tdiscovered
| the error fed back from sendmail when it cannot connect to the
| account, the error comnig back blows the acript at that point- and
| remaining members do nto get the message, but the submiting member
| DOES get a error message. Removing old members one at a time, I
| discovered which ones were doing it, and they are not disrupting it
| any more.
| 
| I need to set up a Try:/Except ERROR: block with a small program and a
| tiny dummy message, and see what the errors look like, and prepare to
| handle them. This shall surely show up again.

Are you doing the SMTP transfer yourself, or are you piping to your
MTA and letting it deal with it?

In the former case, read RFC2821 and the source of some MTA and see
how to handle errors.  (this is why it is better to simply pipe to
your MTA and let it deal with it)

In the latter case, you need a way to set the envelope sender
("MAIL FROM:") to a magic address on your machine that is handled by a
bot.  If a message arrives at that address, your bot removes the
address from the subscription list.  However, don't do that
immediately, only do it if multiple bounces occur (it may be a
one-shot problem with the user's setup and you don't want to drop them
in that case).  For example debian-user sets
"bounce-debian-user=dsh8290=rit.edu@lists.debian.org" as the sender
address for mail it delivers to me.  If the mail is undeliverable,
that's where the bounce message goes.  (unless the system sending the
bounce is a badly broken (MS) system which sends the bounce to the
 From: address).  Then you need to configure your MTA to accept
pattern addresses and deliver them to the bot.

-D

-- 

I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
        Philippians 4:13