Bounce detection

[Ian P. Christian]

Is there really still no email bounce detection in IPB?

With a user base in the 10's of thousands, it's impractical to manage this manually.

[bfarber]

How do you propose a PHP script knows when someone's email bounces?

You have to setup cpanel forwarding to pipe to a PHP script, which not everyone can do, and which has to be done manually. It is just impractical for a forum software to manage anything like that.

[Ian P. Christian]

How do you propose a PHP script knows when someone's email bounces?

You have to setup cpanel forwarding to pipe to a PHP script, which not everyone can do, and which has to be done manually. It is just impractical for a forum software to manage anything like that.

It's really not impractical at all.

Assuming that everyone runs cpanel, and is probably incapable of setting up their MTA is pretty short sighted IMO. For a commercial board designed to cater for large installs, I'd expect this kind of thing. For those not in a position to setup their MTA to deliver over a pipe, they are probably running small forums where the need isn't so important anyway. There's also probably ways you can have IPB check an IMAP/POP3 account to check for NDRs, and have a parser to attempt to read the NDR. I'm sure this parser won't be able to be 100% effective, but it's not that hard.

Some service providers (AOL a prime example) will block a host if you send too many emails to them that result in a non-delivery - so bounce detections is pretty critical here.

There's mailing list software out there that already does this - I imagine there's already VERP implementations in PHP, but I'm sure a Zend Certified developer such as yourself shouldn't struggle with writing this ;)

I encourage other users who also feel that IPB should be able to handle bounces to reply to this thread - I'm interested to see if it's just me expecting too much out of a forum.

If there's any commercial users out there that want to financially sponsor the addition of this feature, I'll be happy to code it myself.

[Tom T]

Assuming that everyone runs cpanel

Problem with your suggestion straight off, not everyone runs cpanel - I don't ;)

[Ian P. Christian]

Problem with your suggestion straight off, not everyone runs cpanel - I don't ;)

Either you replied to the wrong message, or you didnt' understand my point - I was saying that that is shortsighted to make that assumption. I for one wouldn't dream of running cpanel :)

[Luke]

Before when this would suggested I would take the same side as Brandon, but now I agree that this feature should be added.

A email pipe delivers the entire message with headers to a script. IPB should have a script to handle bounced emails regardless of how it's delivered. Basically a general handler that receives an email message via POST, making sure that it comes from either the same server, or a list of approved servers.

That way you can have your own custom script that delivers the email to IPB. With piping, all you'd need is a small script to receive the email and send it to IPB.

Heck... here's an idea. Have two different ways of receiving: Via pipe, or via POST. That way if they don't have the pipe method, they can use another to deliver it to IPB via POST. If all you had was IMAP, you can have a simple script on a cron checking for emails and sending them via POST.

[Ian P. Christian]

That's how I've seen a PHP ticketing systems work - XML data posted back to the application by a mail parser hooked into the MTA.

[bfarber]

I didn't say it's impossible. I said it's not practical. There is a big difference.

Sure you COULD do this or you COULD do that. But there are dozens of basic features the forum software NEEDS to have before you start dealing with stuff like bounced email parsing.

I'm simply not going down this discussion again. Feel free to carry it on if you wish (or find the existing topic on it), but it's just not something worth adding to the forum software at this time. Setting up complicated mail checking to make sure someone entered a valid email address is not as important as, for example, integrated searching. Or easier moderated member management. Or easier skinning.

And I really wish people would stop with the "it shouldn't be that hard for a Zend Certified Engineer". :rolleyes:

[Michael P]

And I really wish people would stop with the "it shouldn't be that hard for a Zend Certified Engineer". :rolleyes:

Your first reply in the topic seemed like you had no idea how it could be done and were asking for suggestions.

Personally; I think thats a bad practice in terms of a development firm. If a client asked me if I could add some complicated feature, instead of saying "how should I do that" I might say "its possible to do that, but it isnt practical for this".

Considering IPB is aiming more and more at small businesses and enterprise markets, and less toward the common website owner, I don't see what the issue is with having some form of bounce detection, even if it only worked on most installations, after all nexus pipes emails and thats also aimed at small businesses.

Features like integrated searching have been suggested long ago, I remember suggesting it along time ago (I think it was when there were customer forums), it is nice to see that it might be being looked into, even if it is a few years to late for some previous gallery owners (I ended up using something free and whipping up a simple script which searched forums, gallery and the website in one go)