[REQ] Email bounce management

[Babylon3k]

I'd really love to see some automated method to handle email bounce backs. It's a problem which everyone comes across, and the larger a community becomes the bigger the problem. While we can manually update every single user when their email address becomes invalid, sorting through every Delivery Failed message can eventually become a timely process. I believe having a standard, automated method would encourage usage, and go a small way to helping reduce the amount of wasted mail traffic out there.

If such a feature was implement, I think the implimentation would need to be carefully chosen by the general level of customisation would roughly follow:

1) Ability to set threshold at which point a user's email is marked is invalid. Perhaps 3 bounced emails by default

2) Different actions possible to apply to a user when their address becomes invalid. Examples:
a) Account marked to receive no further emails
b) Account usergroup changed to email verification

2a seems a friendlier way to handle the process, as it doesn't completely remove their posting rights which may be frustrating, but it would cause any email designated/generated for that user to stay in some kind of IPB mail queue. Or for the email to not be generated at all. The user would be notified of the need to update their email address by, for example, a strip along the top of each page.

I think this offers a fair choice for communities who want to completely enforce someone having a valid email address at all time, and communities who would simply prefer not to continue sending emails to addresses which have become defunct.

I know processing bounce backs for validity would be complicated (perhaps certain tracking headers, and hope they're actually bounced back entirely), but it's a feature I've wanted to see for a long, long time in all community software solutions out there.

[bfarber]

This isn't something that is feasible in a product such as ours, where it can be available in so many environments. You would really need to find someone to build you a custom modification to handle something like this.

[cheresources]

Brandon,

As IPS has become software that folks can use to run their entire website (like I'll be doing), I think that this issue is becoming more and more important. I've been processing bouncing emails manually for some time using an excel spreadsheet to build SQL to remove the users from the two tables where the member data is stored. I used to use a script called ListMail Pro which was really good. It had the user set up an email account to receive bounces and then the bounces were processed via cron daily.

I know that this issue has come up several times and I think that it's likely to continue. With the text editor being upgraded in 3.2, my climbing up the IP.Content learning curve, and getting IP.Downloads set up, this is really the last major piece of the puzzle in making IPS a great product to manage an entire website.

Like IPS did with the text editor, is there a third party solution that could be made to bolt onto IPS?

[Robulosity2]

Ultimately what your asking is rather difficult, because it has to factor in *a lot* and have the logic to manage how it interfaces with member profiling

[h2ojunkie]

There is a plugin for vbulletin 3.X series called vbouncer.

It sets a return path for all emails sent out by the forums, then using a cron job checked that email for bounces daily and can take different actions such as turn off all email notifications for a user, or set them back to unconfirmed status depending on the number of bounces received in a specified time period.

I've used it for years on many different server configurations, and it really works very well. I would think it can't be that hard to port over to IPB.

[7SiN]

[quote name='h2ojunkie' timestamp='1302287888' post='2100180']
There is a plugin for vbulletin 3.X series called vbouncer.

It sets a return path for all emails sent out by the forums, then using a cron job checked that email for bounces daily and can take different actions such as turn off all email notifications for a user, or set them back to unconfirmed status depending on the number of bounces received in a specified time period.

I've used it for years on many different server configurations, and it really works very well. I would think it can't be that hard to port over to IPB.

Totally agree. I used it when on vb and it was very nice. I'm surprised things like this are not already included in forum software.

[bfarber]

The reason things like this generally aren't included in the default software is because it requires specific server configurations to set up. Not all of our customers have the technical knowledge or even ability to set such things up, so we first try to focus on functionality that benefits all of our customers before focusing on functionality that only a subset of our customers can utilize.

On a personal level, I think such a modification would be a wonderful feature. Realistically, however, it's difficult to deliver that could of functionality in an easy-to-understand interface while educating customers on how to configure their servers to make use of it, etc. (I noted that you used a plugin for this on your former software - which is what I recommended looking for above for IP.Board)