[NTLUG:Discuss] quickest way to get bounced email address list.

[Fred James]

m m wrote:

>All:
>
>My company send a lot of emails to the customers, and unfortunately, there 
>are a lot of return/reject email send back to the server.
>
>What is the best/quickest way to get a list of bounced email address from a 
>mail box?
>
>We use sandmail as mail server on fedora core 5. the bounced emails went to 
>the root account.
>Any one has an idea? thanks.
>
>  
>
MM
A mail boxes is generally a text file, frequently a single text file 
containing all mail (maybe someone could correct me on that).  Find the 
text file and

(Method 1) grep it for a common regular expression - perhaps the special 
character '@' (at)?  Often by reading/viewing a portion of the text 
file(s) in question, one can see some common regular expression that 
will fit one's needs.

Once grep'd and redirected to another file, that new file can be edited 
(sed/ex/awk/gawk/whatever) to produce a file with only the email addresses.

(Method 2) use the steps in Method 1, but 'pipe' the two together and 
produce the final file in one pass

(Method 3) process the original mail file with an awk/nawk/gawk script 
to produce the final file - particularly useful if the file is more 
complex than simple

Hope this helps
Regards
Fred James