Hi,

this is not really a DNN query but it affects any site that sends mail and I need some opinions please.

Basically up until 6 months ago I was running as UnVerified on PokerDIY, which means that a lot of emails/users were using invalid addresses (just the nature of the beast). I highly recommend that you switch to Verified Users as soon as possible on your site to save this kind of pain later but that's another thread.

The problem I face now is that when I send a Newsletter I get a lot of SMTP errors and bounces. For example - out of 10 000 I might get 500 invalid emails/failed to send/unkown user etc. etc.

My question is: What should I do with these user records? From a spam point of view am I correct in thinking that every bounce is like a black mark against your SMTP server IP and after enough bounces your IP may be recorded on Email Blacklists?

If this is the case then I need to remove these emails (I am dogfooding the Proximity Mailer on PokerDIY which sends a monthly summary of users in your home town/area and country to each user so it will keep repeating otherwise). What I have been doing is setting all the emails to my own address and removing them from the Newsletter and other email roles so they do not get bothered in the future. Another option would be to set their account to UnAuthorised but then Google has ranked their profiles and I lose a lot of data and Google Juice by doing it this way.

If you think about it logically, if a user used a dodgy email there is NO way you can contact them, and there is no way they can request a new password, so you may as well change their email to your own. This way if they ever requested a password or someone else sent them a PM or something you would get it and at least know that the user was active. All PM notifications, event invites etc. etc. would otherwise bounce with the same message if you just left the record.

From what I understand the web mailing services (Constant Contact etc) automatically remove email addresses that bounce (is this correct, DotNetNuke Corp? You must get a few.) This is fine if you use their service but those records will still be live on your system and whenever your site or a person sends them mail from your IP the problem would remain.

Even verified users might have a valid email and then might not log into Hotmail for 3 months and their account goes inactive. Would this bounce the mail? If so, would you want to just leave it in case they re-activate it again? How do you differentiate between perm bounces and temp bounces?

Does anyone know more about mail/SMTP/spam/managing a social network wrt to emailing? I'd love to hear some thoughts...

Entrepreneur

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I use getanewsletter.com for this and have no headace at all .....

I completely agree with you Rodney.

1. You need a mailbox (or a couple) to capture the messages.

2. You need a method to read and parse the messages. 

3. Then you need an easy way to manage parsing rules and what actions to take. 

For example, the person may have a bad email address, but is very active on your site.  You don't want to remove the user.  You need to prompt the user to update their email address.  You also need to take into consideration the random DNS issues or mail server outages.  The email address may have bounced, but will be perfectly fine the next day.  I can think of about a dozen different rules with different actions that you would need. 

We have this on our road map for Active Social.  We will be using a pop3 client component and the DNN scheduler.