mailing lists

John Payne <john@sackheads.org> writes:

> I'm seeing an increasing number of mailing lists that have a unique
> envelope from for each message.

This may be what qmail's author, DJB, calls VERPs -- Variable Envelop
Return Paths.  Qmail delivers one message per SMTP connection (see the
qmail site for his justification).  If each envelop has a unique
address, then any bounce can be tracked back to the actual desired
destination address.  This works even if the bounce message is
mangled, mutilated, or passed through a bunch of aliases and
forwarders. It's much much more simple than Delivery Status
Notification mechanism which requires every MTA in the chain to
support DSN or it fails. This makes VERPs very useful for mailing
lists, like ezmlm(-idx) which run on qmail.

Usually I've seen this VERP as a "extension address", suffixed to the
base username with a dash. Perhaps you could filter on the first part
before the dash?