From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Oct 12 17:24:31 2007 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id F1D8116A419 for ; Fri, 12 Oct 2007 17:24:31 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from fbsd.questions@rachie.is-a-geek.net) Received: from snoogles.rachie.is-a-geek.net (rachie.is-a-geek.net [66.230.99.27]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CCB6213C442 for ; Fri, 12 Oct 2007 17:24:31 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from fbsd.questions@rachie.is-a-geek.net) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by snoogles.rachie.is-a-geek.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id CDBEC1CDFC for ; Fri, 12 Oct 2007 09:24:28 -0800 (AKDT) From: Mel To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2007 19:24:27 +0200 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.7 References: <470F62F3.9040309@chamonix.reportlab.co.uk> <64D5573F-7C7F-404D-8928-E015D595A54C@goldmark.org> <470F874A.4080305@chamonix.reportlab.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <470F874A.4080305@chamonix.reportlab.co.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200710121924.27410.fbsd.questions@rachie.is-a-geek.net> Subject: Re: genuine bulk email X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2007 17:24:32 -0000 On Friday 12 October 2007 16:40:10 Robin Becker wrote: > Jeffrey Goldberg wrote: [snip IP/hostname issues answered sufficiently by others] > > Automatic mailing is fine. What is important is how the email addresses > > were acquired. > > ...... > > this isn't automatic, the sales people manually enter all the details. The > attached document is what the application generates and then the combined > email. It's also not your concern. Spam prevention is a collection of algorithms that boil down to an acceptable rate of false positives. For the sender of what he/she believes is legitimate email, it is mostly important to catch the false positives /and/ direct them to the people responsible for sending the mail. Also make them understand that they're responsible for the mailing, if they violate their set policy (whatever that may be), they risk being blocked for mail they really want as well. In practice this means errors should be caught, possibly parsed, collected and presented in a format the sender understands. Since most senders aren't mail administrators, directing the bounces to them doesn't help, as you'll be answering questions like "what's a transient error and why do I get this in my email box?". The SMTP standard defines some tools for this, but in practice not all mailservers support these. So what you do is separate the MAIL FROM: smtp command and the From: mail header. Look for the equivalent of sendmail's "-f" option for your MTA, to set the MAIL FROM: (f.e.: bounces@my.dom.ain) and specify a From: header (f.e.: From: The Fabulous Sales Department ) in the mail itself. This way, automated responses arrive at bounces@ and people reply to sales@. How you process bounces@ is up to you and the nature of the mail. You can pipe it to a script directly or you can simply stock it in a normal mail account and process periodically. Machine load, number of mails sent in a batch, whether it's time critical that the original sender knows that a mail fails are all factors in this. -- Mel