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

 > [...]
> What you have set-up for email works like this (y is your domain, z is your ISP/RSPs domain, a is you at z):
 > - Someone spits a message into the ether to x@y
 > - eventually it ends up in the mailbox at a@z

I don't think that is the scenario I want. Let's rewind for a second. In Europe you can buy a package for a few euros a month that includes 
everything but the kitchen sink: a website, a domain name, mail, FTP, ...

The domain name you buy is yours. If you change provider, you can take it with you. Or so I heard (I do not have much experience yet).

So, if my provider receives an e-mail for [email protected] , I then fetch it with getmail, and it lands on my internal mail server, it is 
still [email protected] (still the same domain).

The provider's mail server may not reject the e-mail straight away, because it will store it in the "catch all" mailbox, which accepts 
anything. But my internal mail server can still generate some sort of bounce e-mail later on, right? This is like a "I am on vacation" 
notice. After all, if dovecot-lda can generate bounce e-mails, someone must have deemed it necessary at that point in the delivery phase. 
The internal mail server will only rely that bounce e-mail to my provider's SMTP server, so it still goes out as legitimate e-mail from 
[email protected] .

You would of course try not to send too many bounce e-mails, just like you do in the vacation case, by remembering the last sender addresses.


> If you want to tell people that "x@y" does not exists, deliver all unknown mail to a catch-all mailbox and do it manually.

OK. How would you do it? With some script that goes over some other internal "catch all" mailbox? Have you got any examples at hand? 
Preferably in Perl. 8-)


> You'll probably find that 99% is SPAM, and the other 1% are typos from people who won't respond anyway.

The 99 % spam should be filtered by my provider's mail server and not be considered for automatic bouncing, so that is not an issue.

Silently dropping e-mails from your prospective customers and/or friends because they slightly misspelled your e-mail address is not very nice.

Regards,
   rdiez