Bounced Email Handling: Better via IMAP or Piping?

Is it better to handle bounced emails by having them 1) sent to an IMAP server and then using a cron job to process each one, or 2) to have bounced messages pipe straight to a script for processing.

Please justify your answer.

Pros/Cons would also be helpful.

Thanks!

Answer

To paraphrase Einstein, things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. There is no benefit from the IMAP server for this scenario. If the overhead of processing a single message is high, it might make sense to queue messages for periodic batch processing, but that too can be done on the same server. Unless there are additional hidden requirements, I’d say this is a no-brainer.