never bounce mail again (kinda)

I am an idiot.

Yesterday, I finally re-installed the always-praiseworth Mac::Glue, meaning that I could finally update my mutt address book with addex. I did so, forgetting that I’d (for some reason) fixed a bug in my email sorting program in place rather than in my git repo. When I reinstalled my mail config, I started bouncing mail. I didn’t notice until one of the messages was bounced back to another of my addresses.

This is stupid. I am an idiot, but usually I know how to not bounce mail. “Make sure we don’t bounce mail” is practically my prime directive.

One of the ways we do that is that we always use a piece of code, in all our pipemailers, that turns uncaught fatal exceptions into deferrals. (We also monitor our logs for any unusual deferrals.) We don’t like using pipemailers – it’s the equivalent of using a “vanilla CGI” process instead of a long-running daemon – but sometimes we do.

If I had been using that code, I would not have bounced any mail.

That code has now been released to the CPAN. It will show up there soon as Email::Pipemailer::DieHandler, but for now, it’s also in my GitHub account. Enjoy!

Written on April 25, 2009
📧 email
🐫 perl
🧑🏽‍💻 programming