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dhalliwill
Joined: Oct 28, 2003
# Posts: 1
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Posted: 2003-Oct-28 16:00
I'm looking for information on tools and techniques available for collecting bounced email addresses. Because of the fact that there appears to be no standard format for the content of returned emails, my only current option appears to be to write a rather cumbersome program to try to sift through all the returned emails. One other option that was suggested was to include the address in the return envelope (a variable envelope), and then have the mail server for that domain set to toss all email to invalid addresses to a certain address. I believe this would require you to send to each recipient separately, and I'm wondering about added overhead to the SMTP Server.
Any info, tips, or insight is greatly apprieciated.
Dave Halliwill
dhalliwi@ford.com
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Mike-Levin.com
Joined: Sep 27, 2000
# Posts: 1988
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Posted: 2003-Oct-29 23:00
If all the bounces are going to one email address, then you can write a program that keeps checking the inbox, looking for emails that match the pattern of email bounces. There is no single profile of a bounced email, but you should be able to get most of them with some regular expression matching. It wouldn't be much overhead to the SMTP server, because your program would be running on some other computer, just checking the inbox on some set schedule -- no more overhead than a human doing the same thing. I imagine there must be commercial products to do this, and lots of stuff you could dig up with searches regarding pattern matching that can identify bounces. I have a similar project to this at some point in my future.
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ezClassifieds.com
Joined: Oct 30, 2003
# Posts: 35
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Posted: 2003-Nov-01 04:47
We just assume that a certain percentage are going to bounce, and we have written Outlook Express email rules to just push the bounced ones into a certain folder (easy to write the rules).
We don't have a business reason to worry about who bounces... I would not worry about it unless it is vital.
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EVOrange
Joined: Eons Ago
# Posts: 7
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Posted: 2003-Nov-01 17:24
You might want to consider clearing the bounces for the simple reason that to continue to email to dead addresses at many of the top domains like AOL and Yahoo will get you flagged as a spammer. Then your emails start going into "bulk" folder for everyone, including new sign ups.
There is a program called Gammadyne Mailer that has quite a number of features to handle bounce, including running scripts on the returns.
EVO
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Ron Carnell
Joined: May 15, 2001
# Posts: 206
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Posted: 2003-Nov-01 18:01
It's a fine line to walk.
Failure to cull your lists of bad addresses wastes everyone's resources, especially your own. However, premature deletion of an email address because of a single bounce can also be a waste of a valuable resource -- the email address. Assuming the mail server exists (there is software to check the validity of what is on the right hand side of the @ sign), a bounce that originates with the user side of the email address can often be a temporary situation. Maybe their mail box just overflowed? Do you really want to zap that person on the first bounce?
Good list management software, I think, should allow you to run a resettable counter and remove the address only after X consecutive bounces (X being set by your own policies).
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EVOrange
Joined: Eons Ago
# Posts: 7
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Posted: 2003-Nov-01 22:37
Again, the Gammadyne program does allow you to count it x times before you consider it dead. I am personally not adept at all the functions of the software, but I know they are there. I am not at all connected to them, I just know that the program is very robust and handles these issue as a matter of course.
EVO
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JeffJ
Joined: Eons Ago
# Posts: 7
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Posted: 2003-Nov-16 04:07
You definately want to remove permanent failures from AOL, Yahoo, etc. They are very strict about this. AOL will block your ip address from sending all mail if you fail to meet their bulk mail guidelines.
You could consider using desktop or online/hosted solutions that already have this built in.
Also AOL and others block email from senders where no proper reverse dns entry is provided. So this can limit the success of desktop programs like gammadyne if you run it off your ISPs smtp connection.
Review and implement AOL's best practices and you won't have any worries. Or subscribe to a hosted service that follows these practices already.
http://postmaster.info.aol.com/policy/bestprac.html
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JessyB@HotPOP.com
Joined: Dec 22, 2003
# Posts: 4
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Posted: 2003-Dec-22 13:00
I found a cute program Email Processor (http://www.glocksoft.com/ep/) to handle bounces. You can even set it up to automatically pull down bounced emails from the server, extract email addresses and write them to a file. I also use it to collect email addresses of people who want to subscribe or unsubscribe from my email. Very useful tool, it now does all the work I did by hand earlier.
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