[Vtigercrm-developers] Anyone working on a bounced email processing script? Any tips?

[Philip Kiff]

Before potentially hiring someone to help us create a customized bounced
email processing script, I thought I'd double-check in the developers list
to see if anyone else is working on one already. Or has any tips for us from
previous attempts?

Integrating some kind of bounce processing is definitely the largest missing
feature in vtiger for us, and it is something that lots and lots of other
users have asked for, so I'm sure that several folks must already have
attempted to script something. I'm wondering how far along someone might
already have gotten, and whether you would like to share the code. :-)

My starting point assumes that the bounce message has been (or can be)
pulled into vtiger as a new Trouble Ticket, but that the Trouble Ticket may
come from your own MTA or from an external MTA, and there will necessarily
be some variation in the way the bounce messages are formatted. And such
Trouble Tickets of course will not (yet) be associated with the contact
whose email address actually bounced.

I took a quick look over at SugarCRM to see if I might be able to model my
code on whatever code they might be using in their Community Edition. They
do seem to have some form of bounce processing in place, but it looks like
there are significant drawbacks or weaknesses with it. In particular, their
approach seems to work only when the bounce is being forwarded from your own
MTA, and does not work for bounces that your MTA is unable to process or
which function by including the bounce as an attachment. Apparently the way
they identify the contact is by looking up some ID code that appears in the
campaign email, rather than by examining the bounce message and trying to
parse out the bounced email address from the actual bounce message. And they
aren't able to scan inside the attachments...or something, I'm really not
100% sure.

After looking a bit further, I realized that a proper bounce script will
need to be able to differentiate between "hard", "soft", "temporary" etc.
bounces. I found some PHP code in a sub-project of PHPMailer called
PHPMailer-BMH (Bounce Mail Handler) that could probably form the basis of
the code required to parse the email bodies in the Trouble Tickets:
http://phpmailer.worxware.com/index.php?pg=bmh

I've posted in the bounty forum and got an offer from someone already, but
am still evaluating the best way forward:
http://forums.vtiger.com/viewtopic.php?t=40057

Anyone else working on this? Any tips?

Phil.

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Institute for Work & Health
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