Re: How getmail deals with delivery errors and with bounce e-mails

First of all, thanks for you quick answer.


> You do not *ever* want to generate a bounce message after retrieving a message
 > [...]

I am a newbie and it would be nice if you could mention an example of what kind of problems I would get if I did generate bounce messages 
like that. That would probably help my understanding.

In any case, I am trying to set up an internal mail server like that many people did in the past with Microsoft Exchange and its "POP 
Connector". This internal mail server is not exposed to the Internet and should carry on working internally if the Internet connection 
breaks down. I understand that it may not be economical, but I thought I might just do it for fun, and hopefully learn something along the way.

I thought that the whole point of a multidrop mailbox is that the internal mail server would process all e-mails and generate bounce 
messages if necessary.

In fact, the documentation for dovecot-lda does mention that it can generate bounce e-mails:

https://wiki.dovecot.org/LDA

So at least those guys seem to think that it could somehow make sense.

After getmail retrieves the e-mails, we still have the original envelope address, at least in the X-Original-To header, so we have a good 
chance at generating a correct bounce message (at least with my naive understanding). After all, we are all doing something similar with the 
"on vacation" autoreplies, aren't we?

I wonder how else I could generate such bounce messages. I do not really want to replicate all e-mail accounts and aliases on the ISP mail 
server where the multidrop lives.


> 2) be successfully delivered into a "default"/catchall maildir/etc that gets
> mail which could not be matched to a more specific recipient

It does not look like dovecot-lda would offer such a feature. But even if it did, what should we do with those e-mails? I do not want to 
process them manually.


> 3) be successfully delivered into a "failed" maildir/etc that holds messages
> for which you did not detect the correct destination, or

This actually looks the same as case (2), as far as adovecot-lda features and utomatic bounce messages are concerned.


> 4) something that dumps the message to /dev/null

Well, yes, that is of course always an option! But if somebody misspells an e-mail address, perhaps after misunderstanding it on the phone, 
it would be nice to get some sort of bounce mail back.


> Messages should virtually never be re-injected into an MDA via SMTP or any
> other method (like you would be doing if you generate bounce messages).

I don't quite follow you here, but maybe I am not up to speed yet with the "re-injected" and "MDA" terminology.

We would not be "injecting into an MDA", but generating some kind of bounce message and sending it over an MTA, like we do with "on 
vacation" autoreplies.


> Sorry, IDLE was a user contribution.  I've never used it.  I think it would
> just go on to the next message.

Mmm, that kind of statement is a little worrying indeed!


Thanks for your time,
   rdiez