mg2dsn

Generate rfc6522 delivery status notifications from the Mailgun API.


License
MIT
Install
pip install mg2dsn==0.5

Documentation

What is this?

At twistedmatrix.com, we use mailgun to route our inbound email to a variety of destinations; we also use it to DKIM/SPF authenticate any outbound messages.

The domain is home to several contact aliases, a few mailing lists, and of course project members get their own twistedmatrix.com forwarding emails. Finally, since Mailgun makes heavy usage of Twisted as part of their own system, this allows us to use a nice software-as-a-service package while at the same time dogfooding at least a little bit.

However, this is a bit of an oddball use-case for mailgun; the fine folks at Mailgun themselves will tell you that hosting your personal email there is probably a bad idea; it's really designed for transactional email for applications. Nevertheless, we find it mostly strikes a nice balance for our use-cases.

Mailgun is definitely optimized for bulk, API-based message sending though, and one way this interferes with our use case for it as a mail forwarder for our users and smarthost for our mailing lists is that bounces are never reported to their sender; since they expect that you're using the API, you would deal with a bounce via the API. Furthermore, one "permanent failure" to a particular address creates a "suppression", which means you can never, ever send mail there again.

This has three problematic interactions with our oddball use-case:

  1. Users don't find out that their messages weren't delivered, since they're sending them via SMTP.
  2. Our mailing list software (Mailman) needs to see delivery status information so it can automatically unsubscribe users; if it doesn't have access to bounces, it thinks they're subscribed forever.
  3. Mail servers configured to use black-hole lists sometimes report bogus "permanent" failures even when the failure is actually temporary. We don't want this to prevent delivery forever, for all our users. (Mail server administrators: please, please don't use IP-based blackhole lists. They aren't good at blocking spam; spammers can get new IPs easily. We have DKIM keys. Verify them. Trust our domain reputation, not our IP addresses.)

This script converts from the Mailgun 'bounce' API's entities into RFC6522 Delivery Status Notification messages and delivers them back to the sender, just as a "regular" UNIX-y mail server might do. This lets authenticated users know if they send a message that doesn't get delivered, and it lets any of our automated systems know about bounces they might be generating. It also cleans up the suppressions list so that if those addreses become valid again in the future, we don't find ourselves mysteriously prohibited from sending mail to them.

If you're using Mailgun as a mail forwarder, or as a mixed routing system for a domain that handles both transactional and personal (or human-generated, like support) email, you might find this little pile of hacks useful.