How to process and categorize bounced email?

[Frank]

Hello All,

I am exploring and developing a plan for a C# web app or windows app to
handle bounced emails.

Basically, I need to develop a system where I weed out bad addresses in our
db...but after reading the articles listed below, I see that there are
various responses the server will respond with if the send fails. I would
like to parse the message, and categorize the address accordingly.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? It would be nice to have it be
web based, but it could be a Windows app as well.

I have found two useful articles on the topic so far:

The first is very interesting but in the end I discovered that the code
requires the use of some purchased software. It does however give a good
overall explanation of how I could approach my objective.
http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/clean_your_address_list.asp

The second article is also good and exemplifies how to use the .NET Sockets
class but I can't seem to get it to compile... is it supposed to be for a
web app? I am not even sure...
http://www.webonweboff.com/tips/asp/email.aspx


Thanks in Advance

 

[Greg Young]

I had written and open sourced some code a while ago that may be of some
assistance to you ...

http://sourceforge.com/projects/no-cdo it includes some code to verify email
addresses (only works with some SMTP servers but some will allow it to
actually verify the existence of a given account). It also smart enough to
actually look at the "foo.com" and validate that the domain has an mxrecord.
So an email address of (e-mail address removed) will fail where as it
would pass the regexp validation.

Beyond the sending side you will need to actually receive the bounce emails
and get them from the mailbox.

Cheers,

Greg Young
MVP - C#
http://codebetter.com/blogs/gregyoung