Forum OpenACS Development: Problems delivering mail due to invalid bounce email address

OpenACS creates by default custom bounce addresses in package acs-mail-lite.

#---------------------------------------
ad_proc -public bounce_address {
-user_id:required
-package_id:required
-message_id:required
} {
Composes a bounce address
@option user_id user_id of the mail recipient
@option package_id package_id of the mail sending package
(needed to call package-specific code to deal with bounces)
@option message_id message-id of the mail
@return bounce address
} {
return "[bounce_prefix]-$user_id-[ns_sha1 $message_id]-$package_id@[address_domain]"
}

Based on our experience, most mailers reject e-mails with a non-existing email address, since SPAM mails usually have an invalid bounce email:

localhost postfix/local[14071]: CD99CB8078: to=, relay=local, delay=0.48, delays=0.34/0.08/0/0.06, dsn=5.1.1, status=bounced (unknown user: "bounce-31300-a61ed9ca5c39b63ddf28c3862041d042bd73450a-21457"

To avoid this problem, we simply patched function "bounce_address" as follows:

RCS file: /home/cvsroot/acs-mail-lite/tcl/bounce-procs.tcl,v
retrieving revision 1.2
diff -r1.2 bounce-procs.tcl
58c58,59
< return "[bounce_prefix]-$user_id-[ns_sha1
$message_id]-$package_id@[address_domain]"
---
> return "mailto:existing_email_address@test.com";

Is there anybody else experiencing this sort of issue?

Is there something that would speak against an acs-mail-lite parameter "BounceAddress" and the option to choose between a fixed bounce address and the legacy solution?

Cheers
Klaus

Hi Gustav,
thanks for pointing this out.

Such measure would indeed make the automatic handling of bounces impossible. Then again such feature is not required in all cases and an additional configuration option might eliminate some of the complexity of an initial mail set up.

Next time the issue comes up I'll play with the parameters to see if I can produce an "acceptable" sender address.
However, this seems to be only necessary in scenarios where

a) External Mail Providers have very rigid policies or
b) Company policies prevent changes in local mail server configurations

Thanks Gustaf - very accurate and helpful as always!

Cheers
Klaus