> There are many virus scanners and smtp relays, etc that do not > reject the messages and the user's email will later bounce.
I would take this a giant step further. When it comes to bulk mail, unless you are certain that you've been whitelisted with all of your subscribers, a proportion of messages will get devnulled or dumped into a rarely-checked spam quarantine. As Kevin rightly notes, you have still made a good-faith effort to hand off delivery to the persons responsible for the remote domain. But in reality, you must subtract a consistent % from your apparent # of "true" recipients. This brings me to another point, though. If the reporting agency is content with knowing how many subscribers' MXs accepted each message, why don't you just count zero-hop _bounces_ and subtract them from the total? Don't bother with extended log parsing. Just check the SMTP sender's mailbox after the queue lifetime of the message has expired. How does not get you just as "true" a number as inspecting the logs? In fact, it'll be *more* "true" unless in your parsing logic you are sure to not count transient failures, but only the final disposition known to IMail. Generally, I find that this kind of auditing is much better done using after-the-fact parsing of the bounce mailbox in combination with the original recipient list. You can do a lot more fancy parsing on what is sure to be a smaller set of data (such as separating by bounce type, number of bounces in a row for a given user, etc.). --Sandy ------------------------------------ Sanford Whiteman, Chief Technologist Broadleaf Systems, a division of Cypress Integrated Systems, Inc. e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] SpamAssassin plugs into Declude! http://www.imprimia.com/products/software/freeutils/SPAMC32/download/release/ Defuse Dictionary Attacks: Turn Exchange or IMail mailboxes into IMail Aliases! http://www.imprimia.com/products/software/freeutils/exchange2aliases/download/release/ http://www.imprimia.com/products/software/freeutils/ldap2aliases/download/release/ To Unsubscribe: http://imailserver.com/support/discussion_list/ List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://imailserver.com/support/kb.html
