I run a dating site and trying to figure out how to manage bounced emails where were sent to site members. I am sure other webmasters have encountered the same issue and would like to get their feedback in resolving this issue. I am interested in industry's best practice, so we resolve this issue once for all.

Currently the site sends email notifications to members when other members are trying to contact them, when someone replied to their forum post etc. Some of these bounce due to the fact that

- they have changed their ISP
- their mailbox is full
- they have set an auto responder, or
- their web based email service has been discontinued due to inactivity

Currently we are manually switching off email notifications in user account settings when emails sent to them started to bounce. But this is a time intensive task and adds no value.

So what's the best way to resolve this issue?

Many thanks for taking the time to read and respond to my post.

I am looking in my cpanel under Account Level Filtering. There, I can set up a new filter that will take action on incoming mail. Set this filter to intercept the bounce messages and under Actions, select "Pipe to a Program."

Enter the name of a cgi script that will parse the message and take the actions you currently are manually taking.

Maybe a search will turn up an appropriate script. Just an idea.

Hi Larry,

Thank you for the suggestion. Sounds like it may work. I am keen to find out if other webmasters have used a simiar solution to resolve the problem.

Other webmasters, Please contribute to this discussion. Thanks.

If you're really lazy you can just have the server send your mail from a nonexistent address at your domain and then the bounces bounce >=)

hehe

Doesn't really sove the problem though. Over time there will be thounsands of bounced emails (both ways) every day.

Originally Posted by nyef

If you're really lazy you can just have the server send your mail from a nonexistent address at your domain and then the bounces bounce >=)

hehe

No it won't. Almost all mail servers are setup to not accept a bounced NDR (non-delivery receipt). The bounces won't be accepted. If they were it would bog down whatever mail server was configured that way, as anything that hit that loop would be in the queue forever. So every mail server I've seen is configured by default to not accept a bounced NDR.

Well if we keep sending emails that do not exist then we will continue to receive bounced emais. And as the number of users grow over time and if their email addresses starts bouncing for reasons described above, the number of bounced emails will grow.

What we want to do is to fix the problem and not ignore the bounced emails. There is no point in sending emails to other email servers where we have already determined that those emails no longer exist.

We have to keep in mind that ISP and other email service providers will not be happy if we kept sending emails to those email addresses that do not exist anymore. This is the reason why we would like to come up with a solution.

You are right of course. I was mainly making a joke.

The best thing to do would be to have the bounces go to a mailbox that triggers a script to remove the e-mail from the account, and if you want you could even temporarily disable the account until they provide a valid email address.

Have a catch mailbox to gather the bounced emails and simply use a cron to delete all contents daily.

Originally Posted by tali94

Have a catch mailbox to gather the bounced emails and simply use a cron to delete all contents daily.

Would that not still leave the bad email address on the mailing list, and keep sending emails there?

I have spoiled the reputation of one of my domains because I was sending email from my ISP as "from" my domain, by changing the header in my email client. It was all legitimate and above-board, but it is the same technique used by spammers to send a pile of span "from" you. My brother once had an irate co-worker tell him if he didn't quit sending this (expletive) to his inbox..... and my brother wasn't even using his email! All because a spammer was spoofing his address as a source of his spam.

Anyway, the result of my past actions had a couple big ISPs filtering my domain on their blacklist. I imagine that if you take a clean domain and just sweep bouncing emails under the rug, that someday the domain will take on a dirty reputation amongst the major ISPs and get blacklisted.

My guess is that eighty percent of all email is spam, and 75% of the remainder is forwarded forwards of forwarded jokes and cute sayings, or in other words, a load of rubbish for the most part! it's the remaining 2% that might have some worthwhile value.

As a way to keep the riff-raff out of my site's Dada-Mail mailing list, I have set the subscription pages off-limits in my Robots.txt, along with the mailing list script pages, and these things don't show up in search results pages as a result. I have also put my contact page off-limits to minimize the link-farm emails pasted into my feedback form, which is coded specifically to look for and reject suspicious content.

I also coded my email addresses published on the web site using Mailto: Obfuscator in Windows, or more recently, in Linux, a Perl script that I have written to run on my desktop to accomplish the same thing.

--
Larry