Bounced e-mail handling?

[jackalfive]

I've just started using Max Bulk Mailer this week, and am working with a list with over 3000 addresses. After I sent out the mailer yesterday (to all 3000 recipients) I received about 200-300 bounced e-mails in my inbox.

Now I read through them, and have decided to make a list of all the addresses that failed, and remove them from our mailing list to prevent future bounce backs. However, I'm kinda confused where to draw the line with who to cut.

Some obviously need to be removed because of "fatal errors" while sending, or the person typed their e-mail address wrong (ie. hotmial.comn) when registering. Others though, it just says something like "Mailbox Unavailable". Should I be removing these addresses as well, or should I just leave them on the list? I don't wanna keep getting hundreds of bounced e-mails everytime, and having less addresses will help send the mailers more efficiently, but at the same time I don't wanna piss off a bunch of people by removing them from our mailing list without their request.

Just curious if other people have had the same dilemma. Any and all advice regarding this would be greatly appreciated.

 

[stanbusk]

You should use eMail Bounce Handler for that. eMail Bounce Handler process all the emails available on your POP or IMAP inbox to find out whether they are bounces or not, extracts addresses, deletes them (from mailbox) keeping other messages untouched. Usually you will use eMail Bounce Handler right after sending a message with MaxBulk or any other bulk mailer, this way:

1.- Shut down all mail applications (to avoid any of them to interfere).
2.- Launch MaxBulk and send your message.
3.- Wait until delivery is done.
4.- Launch eMail Bounce Handler.
5.- Set it to run every 15 minutes.
6.- Wait at least 60 to 120 minutes until eMail Bounce handler is finished.
7.- Save eMail Bounce Handler bounce addresses list.
9.- Rename the file to "DELETE" and drop it over your master list in MaxBulk.

Usually you will use the same eMail Bounce Handler document again and again after each mail campaign. Once you reach a given number, say 10 mailings, you can choose to generate the DELETE list with all addresses that have bounced 10 times. That is to make sure you will never delete temporally down or over-quota addresses. In other words, if a message always bounce it is likely dead.

 

[jackalfive]

Oh okay, thanks. I'm gonna go read up more about that app now, but that sounds perfect.

I was actually considering doing something similar to that, just doing everything myself. (Ie., write down all the e-mails that bounced, and track them each time, bla bla bla). I may need to convince the bosses to spend the extra 25 bucks, but considering the time that'll save me it'll be worth it.

Thanks a lot for your help.

-J