BOUNCED(8)

💖 BOUNCED(8) 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the manual page for bounced / bounced.pl — the Mailing List Bounce Processing Daemon for Sympa. she's giving quiet background worker energy but honestly? she's the main character of your delivery failures. periodt. 🌸

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

bounced.pl [ --foreground ] [ --debug ]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so bounced is this program that just… endlessly scans the bounce spool. like, permanently. forever. she never sleeps (unless you pass flags, we'll get there 💅). and while she's scanning she processes bounces — aka non-delivery messages — looking out for bad addresses. 👀

the bouncing addresses get tagged in the database, and the last bounce is kept for each bouncing address. so no, she doesn't hoard every single one, she keeps the receipts but just the most recent one. that's called boundaries. 🎀

once bounced has done her lil processing thing, list owners can go peek at the bounce info through WWSympa. she does the work, WWSympa does the showing off. teamwork, fr fr. 🤝

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

k so these programs follow the usual GNU command line syntax — long options start with two dashes (--). here's the whole menu, no skips, no crumbs left behind: 🍓

• -F, --foreground — do not detach the TTY. she stays right there in your face, holding your terminal hostage. clingy but make it useful. 🙈
• *-f, --config=file* — force bounced to use an alternative configuration file instead of /etc/sympa/sympa.conf. basically "bestie, wear this outfit instead." 👑
• -d, --debug — run the program in a debug mode. she starts oversharing. 💀
• -h, --help — print this help message. she tells you how to use her. iconic. 💅
• *--log_level=level* — sets the daemon log level. turn the volume knob on her diary. 🎚️

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🌈 FILES 🌈

the sacred texts, aka where everything lives:

• /etc/sympa/sympa.conf — Sympa configuration file.
• $LIBEXECDIR/bouncequeue — the bounce spooler, referenced from the sendmail alias file.
• $SPOOLDIR/bounce — the incoming bounces directory (where the sad emails pile up 🥲).
• $PIDDIR/bounced.pid — this file contains the process ID of bounced.pl. her birth certificate, lowkey. 💜

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🧚 MORE DOCUMENTATION 🧚

the full docs are right here and they're a whole vibe:

<https://www.sympa.community/manual/>

and the mailing lists (with web archives, yes, the archives are preserved, slay) live at:

<https://www.sympa.community/community/lists.html>

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📜 HISTORY 📜

this program was originally written by, and we stan:

• Serge Aumont — Comité Réseau des Universités
• Olivier Salaün — Comité Réseau des Universités

and this manual page was initially written by Jérôme Marant <jerome.marant@IDEALX.org> for the Debian GNU/Linux system. thank you for your service, fr. 🫶

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⚖️ LICENSE ⚖️

you may distribute this software under the terms of the GNU General Public License Version 2. for more details see the README file.

permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts and no Back-Cover Texts. a copy of the license can be found under:

<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html>

ok real talk for one sec: these license terms are not a vibe, they're a rule, so bestie please actually read them and don't just scroll past. 💖

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💀 BUGS 💀

report bugs to the Sympa bug tracker. see:

<https://github.com/sympa-community/sympa/issues>

(not me telling you to go complain, but like, constructively. 😭)

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• sympa_msg(8)
• wwsympa(8)
• mhonarc(1)
• sympa_config(5)
• Sympa::Spindle::ProcessBounce

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and that's the whole page bestie!! this was version 6.2.80 of the sympa docs, dated 2026-10-19 — she ate and left no crumbs. go process some bounces, you got this. 🎀✨💜