At 12:40 PM -0500 1/18/02, Richard G. Ball is rumored to have typed:

If it warrants FAQ status maybe it'd be better to include the names & contact info for a few of those scripts "out there" (a quicky google search for "email perl probe" doesn't seem to grab anything interesting).

I don't use any of those I've bumped across over the years so I never bothered to note them. And I don't _need_ one, since I hacked my own in Frontier on the Macintosh. But I should probably note I _never_ said there were perl scripts specifically...there are bunches of ways of writing a script (shell, python, the aforementioned Frontier, etc., etc.). Besides, this honestly isn't rocket science...you basically want to send seperate email messages to every address in your dist file (or a subset if you know what address range or domain is bouncing, or want to send to the first half, or whatever). A simple script that places a key (or just use the email address itself) in the subject header field and the first line of the body so you can correctly identify the bounce, with an explaination as to why the 99% of the receivers that WON'T bounce is getting this junk, is all you need. I'm kinda busy this afternoon (working for a living bites), but didn't someone reference specific software a couple of weeks ago the _last_ time this topic came up? I know there was a discussion of methodology in probing the smallest number of addresses to track it down and such, but I don't remember if there was spoecific software mentioned. If I get time this evening, I'll search my personal list archive....I'm getting too old to remember stuff I don't specifically need. (And I forget a lot of that, too.) Charlie (who is thinking about scripting a response to this one)