How to receive delivery failure notification
Were well into the second week and weve still not fully implemented all stories for the first iteration. I really underestimated the amount of tweaking and real-world testing needed to figure out how to create and send email in such a way as to received meaningful notification for delivery failures. So far, we've learned the following:
- The Errors-To header is just not going to work most of the time. You have to set the email address you want to receive notification on in the From header. We're now setting the email adress of whoever wrote the message in the Reply-To header so that the receiver can still reply directly.
- If you send an email to multiple recipients, you will probably not receive a notification if the email cannot be delivered. It doesn't matter if the delivery failed for only one, for some, or for every single recipient. If you want to receive failure notification, it seems that you better send each email to a single recipient only.
Another thing to consider is that it might take up to at least 7 days before a MTA decides to give and you'll get the email returned. Right now, I'm still receiving return email from out first test run last week...