Email Bouncing

[jay]

When ever you send emails to people there is always a chance that the email may not make it to its intended recipient. This can be for many different reasons such as the email address is invalid, their inbox is full, their mail server is down and many more. When this happens, the email is 'bounced' back to you (or the address you nominate as the bounce email address). This comes in the form of a simple message that lets you know what email address bounced and the reason why it happened.

The reason why you want to process bounced emails is that if you continually send emails to invalid email addresses you can run the risk of having your server black listed and not being able to send any more emails from there. Processing your bounced emails will keep a record of what emails have bounced so that you do not continue to send to these addresses.

When sending your email campaigns or autoresponders, you have the option of entering in a bounce email address. This email address is an email account that you need to create on your server. Any bounced emails will go to that email address. They will remain in this email account until you delete them manually or you process bounces.

a) A soft bounce is a temporary bounce such as "This user's mailbox is full."

b) A hard bounce is a permanent bounce such as: "This email account does not exist."

c) If it's a soft bounce, the application will record the bounce but will take no action on the email address until it soft bounces 5 times. Once an email address has soft bounced 5 times, it is treated as a bounced email which means it will not be emailed any more.

A hard bounce is processed as a bounced email right away.

When a hard bounce email is found, the contact is not removed from the contact list, otherwise you could accidentally re-add them again later. Instead they are still kept on your contact list but will not be emailed the next time you send your email campaign.

Here are the steps to make sure that you site is not blacklisted because of email bouncing :-

1. Make sure that headers include return-path address. This is the address to which bounced mails are sent.

2. Delete or inactivate the bounced email addresses

Here is an example of php standard header :-

$headers = "From: myplace@here.com\r\n";
$headers .= "Reply-To: myplace2@here.com\r\n";
$headers .= "Return-Path: myplace@here.com\r\n";
$headers .= "CC: sombodyelse@noplace.com\r\n";
$headers .= "BCC: hidden@special.com\r\n";