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How do i detect emails that bounce from there destination?

Posted: Tue Oct 19, 2004 7:38 am
by igohar
I am trying to send an email newsletter to a group of people using my custom made emailer. Now my problem is that the emailer is sending out the mails perfectly fine but i am unable to detect which of the email addresses are invalid because i am receiveing no bounced emails indicating to me those email addresses that did not exist! I have tried entering some invalid email addresses as a test and still no use.

I am using my SMTP server to run the emailer script.

Posted: Tue Oct 19, 2004 8:10 am
by John Cartwright
I'm not sure if there is an efficient way to do this, but one way I have accomplished this is by having an image load from your server on the email and check if the user has viewed the image.

If user has not opened the email in lets say, the last 3 newsletters sent, remove his email perhaps.

Posted: Tue Oct 19, 2004 11:47 am
by timvw
most "decent" e-mail clients don't allow external images to be loaded. So that won't work...

Posted: Tue Oct 19, 2004 1:11 pm
by m3mn0n
Yes, that is true. But people ignore the images for e-mails they don't want to read.

If it's a legit newsletter and they opted-in to receive it, chances are that they will allow images within the message body. And maybe even a little message at the bottom stating that images should be displayed would help.

Then when the 3rd miss occurs, send a warning notice instead of the 4th letter just so they know images should be allowed. And when it comes time for the 5th, if anyone who didn't reply to the warning letter doesn't reply, delete them from the database of newsletter members.

With all those steps included, only then IMO will this "4th newsletter warning" setup be a good solution.

Posted: Tue Oct 19, 2004 4:00 pm
by patrikG
The img-tag trick will only tell you if an email has been opened. Hence, you'd be removing everyone who hasn't opened their email in a certain period of time. Thus: that's not a solution. Reg. sending out warning emails: users tend to react somewhat hostile when being told what to do.

Handling incoming mail with PHP is not too difficult. If you have ssh-access to your server and/or sendmail or postfix installed already you can do it fairly quickly. Evolt has a nice tutorial on how to do it: http://evolt.org/article/Incoming_Mail_ ... index.html

Posted: Tue Oct 19, 2004 4:06 pm
by Weirdan
patrikG wrote:Handling incoming mail with PHP is not too difficult. If you have ssh-access to your server and/or sendmail or postfix installed already you can do it fairly quickly. Evolt has a nice tutorial on how to do it: http://evolt.org/article/Incoming_Mail_ ... index.html
The problem was thad he didn't get any bounces even while sending messages to non-existent addresses.

Posted: Tue Oct 19, 2004 4:09 pm
by patrikG
Ah. Reality is funny - there are so many of them and I grabbed the first one floating in front of my blurred eyes. Reality that is :oops: