Matching Bounce/DSN with Original Sent Email
Question:
Given that bounced email / DSN’s may not include the original headers, if I need to
uniquely identify that the specific email didn’t make it to the
recipient is there any way I can uniquely ID the email? I would use this
info to know when to resend the email.
Answer:
Sometimes you’ll receive bounces that conform to DSN (delivery status notification) standards, but many times the bounce notification will be an ad-hoc email the conforms to no standards. Often the only information available is the original sender’s email address, and sometimes not even that is available. The Chilkat Bounce component/library is good for parsing the hundreds of different types of ad-hoc bounce and other automated replies, and will classify the bounce as one of 14 types and will parse out the original sender’s email address, if available.
If you’ve determined the email is a bounce reply using Chilkat Bounce, you might then check to see if it’s a standard DSN. The Chilkat.Email.IsMultipartReport method can be called to determine if the email is a multipart/report, which is the content-type for DSN’s. You may parse a DSN as shown in these examples: