I’m looking for a way to handle undeliverable (bounced) email messages when I send a mailout to my lists. I currently have all other aspects of my mailing list manager done … just nothing to automatically recognize bounces.
My current course of action is to manually grab the mailbox file itself, and parse it with a PHP script, looking for email addresses. But that seems a bit crude.
I realize some newsletter/autoresponder services can do this … but I don’t want to purchase an entire system. I just need something to handle undeliverables.
Ideally, it could recognize various kinds of bounces, like permanent failures, full mailboxes, “out of office”, etc.
Any ideas?
I don’t know of any scripts, but I do remember reading something at php.net (one of the user contributed notes somewhere near the mail function) that described how you could check for bounced emails.
You might want to have a look for that post.
Thank you, cranial-bore. I checked it out, and it led me to more info elsewhere … and basically it comes down to pointing bounced messages to a script instead of a mailbox. That’s my webhost’s job, apparently … but then I need to write the script to handle the messages. Not exactly sure how to actually receive the messages into PHP variables. Also, I’m sure there is a script out there to handle & parse standard email formats, but I haven’t found anything … yet 
Sorry for bumping this old thread, but I found this through Google and figure others looking for the same will to!
The following two pages were able to solve this problem for me. Hope they are useful to others!
http://www.evolt.org/incoming_mail_and_php