Mail::...VBounce(3pm)

💖 NAME 💖

Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::VBounce — bestie, this is the plugin whose whole job is rescuing genuine bounces 🫶 like it literally saves your legit bounce messages from getting clowned on. ✨

(Also hi, this is a page from the User Contributed Perl Documentation, in case you were wondering who wrote it. It was the people. The people wrote it. 🎀)

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::VBounce [/path/to/VBounce.pm]

that's it. that's the whole summoning ritual. no cap. 💅

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🌸 USER PREFERENCES 🌸

okay so these options are yours to play with, and the way they work is you can drop them in both the site-wide local.cf config file and the user-specific user_prefs config file — both files, same options, it's giving inclusive 💜 — and they customize how SpamAssassin handles incoming email messages. yes ma'am. 👑

✨ welcomelist_bounce_relays hostname [hostname2 ...] ✨

first things first, the lore: this option used to be called whitelist_bounce_relays, and the old name will keep working interchangeably until 4.1. so if you see the old name out in the wild, do not panic, it's the same girlie. 💅

so what does it do? it's the 'rescue' mission for legitimate bounce messages — specifically the ones that got generated in response to mail you really did send. 🫶 what you do is list the MTA relay hostnames that your outbound mail gets delivered through. then, if a bounce message shows up and it contains one of those hostnames in a 'Received' header found in the message body, it will not be marked as a blowback virus-bounce. it's saved. it's rescued. it's safe. 😭✨

the hostnames can be file-glob-style patterns, so relay*.isp.com will work — like, that's a valid entry, go off. specifically, * and ? are allowed, but all other metacharacters are not. and no, you cannot use regular expressions here, and the reason is security reasons. 🔒 regular expressions are not used for security reasons. periodt.

multiple addresses per line, separated by spaces, is OK 💖 and multiple welcomelist_bounce_relays lines are also OK. stack 'em up, bestie, however many lines you need, it's fine.

fr fr do not try to sneak a regex in there, bestie. it's * and ? or nothing. the security girlies said so and they ate. 👑

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okay that's the whole page, you're officially a VBounce expert, main character energy achieved 🌈⭐💖

this was Mail::...VBounce(3pm) from the User Contributed Perl Documentation — perl v5.40.1, dated 2026-07-23 — mwah, go rescue some bounces, ily, bye 🎀🦋💜