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Doing bulk emails, I face the common problem of bounces flooding the sender address.

In my setup, the From field is equal to the envelope from. So I am considering the following:

  • put a noreply@ (black hole) into From and the envelope from, which is where bounces will be sent;
  • put a real mailbox into Reply-To, which is where actual replies (that I don’t want to miss) are supposed to be sent.

But: I’ve read a few discussions of this problem on the Web, and the consensus seems to be: use a real mailbox in From and envelope from, then use heuristics on your own side to distinguish bounces / auto-replies from the real replies.

So is this the preferred approach, and why? Will my setup not work, and why?

Kevin Reid
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Vasiliy Faronov
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2 Answers2

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Bounces should go to the envelope sender, replies to the From: address (or Reply-To: if you specify that, but some braindead clients ignore it ... unsurprisingly, Microsoft is among the offenders). The standard solution to bounce handling is to use VERP. If you don't care who bounced, just put the bounce box as the envelope sender.

Not all MTAs are religious about bouncing to the envelope sender, either, but it would not be particularly draconian IMHO to unsubscribe users who run their mail server on SunOS 3 or Macintosh System 6 in this day and age.

tripleee
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Well, one potential problem is that some mail providers (such as Yahoo mail) look at the email address the email came from, and if it is a "noreply" type address they'll disable the quick reply box and replace it with a message that says "The sender won't receive your answer if you reply" (or something along those lines).

Not 100% sure if it would see the difference if there was a reply-to address specified, but it's just something to keep in mind!

manavo
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