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

[Philip Kiff]

> This is quite a complex problem to solve as you rightly
> suggest later in your message.

Yes, though as I continue to think about things, I realize that I am still
in the process of discovering the complexities.

Something I just realized is that a proper bounce system would actually tie
the bounce record into the campaign mailing records somehow as well...either
by using the "status" field where you can mark whether a campaign was
successful with a particular contact, or by adding a new field similar to
that one for recording just the send/receipt/bounce status. Although in my
explorations of vtiger so far, that "status" field seems only partially
implemented into the rest of the vtiger system -- I gave up using it because
I couldn't see how to report on it or pull up results easily when viewing a
contact -- in 5.2.1 you can only adjust the status field by going into the
campaign module and then paging through the contacts until you find the one
you want to record the status of. So a good bounce processing system should
not only find and associate the bounced message to the appropriate contact
(based on parsing the bounce message headers and body), but then also should
be able to make various changes to that contact, record the status of the
campaign email in that status field, and then also adjust a couple fields in
the Trouble Ticket itself.

And if you are processing bounces from non-English mail servers, I bet they
send out their bounce messages in other languages...possibly even other
character sets. 

I'm not familiar enough with vtiger to understand where this customization
should be going on. Should it be a separate "extension"? or some kind custom
workflow function? or a single add-on script called during the mail
converter process?

Grrr...

> FWIW we use an external email mailer called OpenEMM [1] which
> does handle most bounces properly, scales and is very fast.
> We haven't done much vtiger-mailer integration (the current
> web services on OpenEMM is very limited but that should
> change later on) but for our needs it is fine.

Thanks for the tip. I wasn't familiar with OpenEMM, and that's a good
resource to know about. We're on an IIS server, and I'm not sure if that is
compatible with OpenEMM...and I guess I'm interested in seeing if we can
find a vtiger solution if possible. We're not actually a big mass emailer,
so we probably don't need a completely robust system for what we do...but
we've got this first huge round of bad email addresses to deal with after
bringing our entire database of contacts into vtiger.
 
> The other php area to look into might be some of the mailers
> for Joomla!, Drupal or My Source Matrix, some of these
> add-ons might have already solved the problem and be of a suitable
> license. 

We work quite a bit with Drupal, and that's a good suggestion. If there's
something usable there (or possibly over in CiviCRM...), then that may help.

Phil.