genuine bulk email

[Mel]

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 at my.dom.ain) and 
specify a From: header (f.e.: From: The Fabulous Sales Department 
<sales at my.dom.ain>) in the mail itself. This way, automated responses arrive 
at bounces@ and people reply to sales at .

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