Bounce Processing for Mandrill Bulk Email

[sonicthoughts]

Mandrill pricing is very attractive: http://mandrill.com/pricing/ and I would like to consider it for bulk mail (in addition to transactional email.)
Unfortunately, they encapsulate the return channel - the X-civicrm header is there, but the bounce processor does not see it for some reason.  They also offer a forward for bounces but again, do not conform to VERP. 

There is of course the mandrill transaction email extension: http://bit.ly/1n8igDM which uses webhooks for bounce processing - definitely the way to go!
1. I have had a lot of trouble getting that module to work properly.  one caveat is that it triggers IDS.
2. I figured I could set up smtp for bulk email and let the webbook just flag bad emails.  Ideally, the extension should be rewritten to support bulk, but thought at least I could tag bounces - alas, it doesn't work and I can't figure out why.

I wondered if anyone else is interested in this approach, or has success getting bounce processing to integrate w/ mandrill.

[Martin Fuggle]

I have just started using Mandrill and the Bounce Processing does not seem to be working for me either. I receive emails with subject Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender. But my problem may be that I have not got CivCRM bounce stuff set up correctly. When I run the Bounce Fetcher I get an authentication error which will almost certainly be the cause of the problem but I am not sure where the authentication settings are coming from.

Maybe someone could assist.

Cheers
Martin Fuggle

[xavier]

Unfortunately, they encapsulate the return channel - the X-civicrm header is there, but the bounce processor does not see it for some reason.  They also offer a forward for bounces but again, do not conform to VERP. 

So it should parse the header and look for a regexp that contains
X-CiviMail-Bounce

it's in CRM/Utils/Mail/EmailProcessor.php, can you investigate why it doesn't work for Mandrill?