Email bounce-back

[PatrickRQ]

Hi IPS,

Can you implement a mechanism that would periodically check if emails the accounts are registered on still exist, are still valid or not blocked? Would be great to reduce a bounce back rate. Such user would be marked automatically by notifications system and bulk mail system as "DO NTO SEND".

Edited March 21, 2023 by PatrickRQ

[Randy Calvert]

This could be dangerous to do. The only way to do this is to attempt to connect to the mail server and check the response. 

While this can work for a few addresses, doing it in bulk for large numbers of addresses on a regular basis could get you blocked. 

Instead of IPS doing this, I would recommend some sort of integration with a third party checking service that rotates IPS and has a strategy of how to do this safely. 

[PatrickRQ]

1 hour ago, Randy Calvert said:

Instead of IPS doing this, I would recommend some sort of integration with a third party checking service that rotates IPS and has a strategy of how to do this safely. 

Even that, despite I would pre-sort it, such would need to be flagged on regular basis, e.g. when I send Bulk main trough IPS, the system should flag those that bounced back.

[PatrickRQ]

Also, forums constantly sends notifications, they could be used to regularly maintain dead emails and mark account/email as "NO_SEND" upon x fails.

IPS should consider this type of tools as built-in. This way they can save our money being spent on external services. This way we are willing to pay more for IPS subscriptions as we do not have to spend on something else.

The more we are pushed away from IPS software to any external ones the less reasonable all this becomes.

Edited March 21, 2023 by PatrickRQ

[Matt]

Pre-checking isn't really how email works.

We are however adding bounce management tools to our cloud platform to help prevent multiple bounces and to manage blocked emails.

[balazsp]

@PatrickRQ 

When I had to validate like 100k email addresses, I used ZeroBounce to do the heavy lifting, then moved the email addresses/users to a do-not-mail usergroup with mysql.

 

[PatrickRQ]

19 hours ago, Matt said:

We are however adding bounce management tools to our cloud platform to help prevent multiple bounces and to manage blocked emails.

Cloud isn't an option for everyone @Matt, I believe many users will tell you that. Therefore a way to flag dead email accounts on regular basis would be very handy for "classic hosting" users 😉

[Randy Calvert]

The question is how to do it.  In the cloud version, they get notifications of all the bounces from AWS programatically.  So they can actually process them. 

In a self-hosted environment, there is no easy way to get notifications from random email providers about what emails bounced or were reported as spam.  

They're not likely to implement something that is going to get customer accounts blocked by either their host or major mail providers either because it would cause major issues with supporting it.  

[Matt]

What Randy said. 

[Myr]

We use @stoo2000's Mail Bouncer app with Amazon SES for this. 

It works great at stopping email sending to bad accounts including when they report you as spam. 

It would be nice to have it built in feature or at least guarantee the app would be maintained if stoo2000 decided to move on from it's development. 

[Randy Calvert]

Myr... that only works if you're using AWS for sending email.  It is basically the same thing for @Jon Erickson's app as well.  (Which is what I used for a long time and works great.)

With that said... that would mean to do this, IPS would have to dictate that customers would have to use AWS for sending email.  The vast majority of self-hosted customers are not using it and would be hard-pressed to properly setup SES, configure SNS notifications, get out of the AWS sandbox, create the correct DNS/DKIM/SPF record, etc.   

Can you imagine the amount of support and hand holding that would need to be done?  I'm a fairly competent system admin, and I still had a complication or two that Jon had to help me with.  Imagine the normal customer who does not understand setting up IAM roles and the difference between SNS and SES.  It becomes a train wreck before it's even had a chance to leave the station.  🙂