MailBounce's "Autoresponder Rejection" File

A key feature of MailBounce is its ability to export unrecognized bounces to a separate file, either for further automated processing or (more commonly) for human evaluation. This export file will contain everything that does not qualify as a "bounce" when MailBounce processes the bounce file; thus, the export file will often contain a lot of useless or unimportant messages. The Autoresponder Rejection file allows you to reduce or eliminate the clutter from the export file.

Specifically, when MailBounce exports unrecognized bounces, it will typically include everything that is either not recognized or is not considered to be a "final" bounce; this includes "transient" bounces, such as notifications that the mail server has not yet delivered your message, but will continue trying for some period of time. (Since the message might still be delivered to the recipient, MailBounce will not process transient bounces. If the message has not been successfully delivered by the time the queueing period has expired, then the mail server will return a final bounce, which will be processed by MailBounce.)

Autoresponder notifications are another type of non-bounce message; these are the common "message has been opened by recipient," etc., notifications. Very often, you will not want to include these in the Unrecognized Bounces export file.

In order to eliminate the unwanted clutter from the export file, selected message formats can optionally be excluded from the file. To exclude a specific message format from the Unrecognized Bounces file, a unique "piece" of the message is entered into the "Autoresponder Rejection" file, as described below.

In order to activate the Autoresponder Rejection file feature, you must make the following settings in the Preferences file:

use autoresponder rejection file = 'YES'
autoresponder rejection file name = 'AR_rejection_file.txt'

Autoresponder Rejection File Format

Each line in the AR Rejection file is formatted as follows:

"rejection string" [optional comment]

where:

• The rejection string is some unique line of text, or a piece of a line of text, from the type of bounce or autoresponder message that you would like to exclude from the export file. See below for details on how to select these text strings.

• The rejection string must be enclosed in double quotes, as shown. See below for a formatting example.

• Anything to the right of the quoted rejection string is considered to be a comment, and is ignored by MailBounce. Comments are optional, and must not contain any double quotes.

• Any line that starts with "#", "!", or ";" is considered to be a comment line, and is ignored.

• any line that does not contain at least one pair of double quotes is treated as a comment line and is ignored.

• Blank lines are ignored.

"The message that you sent was opened by the following:"
"THIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY"
"YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE"
"Warning: message still undelivered after "
"Will keep trying until message is "

Blank lines are ignored, as are lines without at least one pair of double quotes.

On each line, MailBounce will extract only the data that appears between double quotation marks. Thus, comments can be inserted on either side of the quotes:

Lotus Notes:      "The message that you sent was opened by the following:"
Transient bounce: "THIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY" (MB ignores these bounces)
                  "YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE"
Transient bounce: "Warning: message still undelivered after "
                  "Will keep trying until message is " (another one that MB ignores)

Blank lines are ignored, as are lines without at least one pair of double quotes.

MailBounce will process both examples the same way.

Note that you are limited only by available memory in the number of strings you may specify in the AR Rejection file. The strings are case independent, so you may use upper, lower or mixed case, according to your own preference.

[home]

[ReadMe]