Sample Postmaster Correspondence

This "form letter" can be modified for your use in communicating with postmasters whose mail bounces do not conform to the relevant Internet standards.

(BTW, there is little sense in mentioning in your correspondence that this is really for the purpose of automated bounce processing, since you are not likely to get much sympathy that way. ;-)

Remember to insert the entire bounce (complete with full headers) after the "====" delimiter.

Dear Postmaster:

The attached error message is not useful to me as a mailing list owner.
It is necessary to have the actual RCPT-TO address from the message
envelope in order for me to trace this error back to the address that
generated it.

Specifically, I need the *original* "envelope from" address, from the
SMTP RCPT TO:<> transaction -- not anything from the "To:" line, which
is usually irrelevant for mailing lists.

It would be most helpful if you would modify your bounce messages to
conform to Internet standards. Please see RFC-1891 -- particularly
Section 4, which reads (in part):

    In order that any delivery status notifications thus generated
    will be meaningful to the sender, any ESMTP server ... will
    attempt to propagate the following information:

    (a) for each recipient, a copy of the original recipient
    address, as used by the sender of the message. This address need
    not be the same as the mailbox specified in the RCPT command.
    For example, if a message was originally addressed to A@B.C and
    later forwarded to A@D.E, after such forwarding has taken place,
    the RCPT command will specify a mailbox of A@D.E. However, the
    original recipient address remains A@B.C. 

... and Section 7.3:

	(e) The Final-Recipient field MUST be supplied. It MUST contain
    the recipient address from the message envelope. 

  RFC1891: http://andrew2.andrew.cmu.edu/rfc/rfc1891.html

Such standards exist for a reason; non-compliance causes problems.

Also, if your MTA is one that returns the entire body of the bounced
message, please note that it is not necessary to return the message
body for any message that contains a "Precedence: Bulk" tag in the
header. But that's really just points for style.

Thank you in advance for updating your system to conform to these
standards. (This has been a pre-recorded message.)

[.sig block]

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