David Rusenko

Startup Email: Monitor your bounce messages 06/06/2008

If you're running an internet service, you'll probably need to send emails to your users at some point. Getting those emails through to their inbox can be quite a challenge.

You can pay someone to do it (ConstantContact, Boomerang, etc), but their rates are through the roof -- this can be as high as a couple cents per email. The lowest quote we were able to get was about $0.003 per email, with huge volume. Sending out one email to our user base would have cost nearly $2,000.

At that point, you've just got to do it yourself. One of the main things we didn't want to handle was tracking bounce messages. All major services require that you do this: if you send a message to an invalid address twice, you will be heavily penalized.

I hacked up a quick script to login to an IMAP server, check for bounce messages, fetch the dead email, and move the messages out of the inbox. Since I figured it could be useful to more than just me, I've open sourced it.

You can grab a copy of the source here: monitorBounces.php

If anybody else has written any other software to help them get past the near defacto spam classification, please let me know : )

Comments

Scott Whigham

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 02:55:50

I have the same problems. I fixed it using Dave Wanta's ListNanny (I use .NET) and wrote a scheduled job to check for bounces and unsubscribe the failures from our list.

http://www.listnanny.net/

Josiah

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 05:44:17

From the ConstantContact site: "Monthly fee based on your email list size, not on the number of email campaigns you send"

Also, CC provides other valuable services besides "bounce reporting" like making sure your IP/domain doesn't get banned by every major ISP for spamming (they handle those agreements and send your mail for you). Also they track opens, clicks and allow you to segment based on that data (among other things)

I wouldn't risk having your domain/IP blacklisted by ISP's just to save a few bucks, believe me I've been there (Comcast doesn't give a crap)

Debbie Gallagher

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 04:29:00

Hi David, I hate to bother you on your blog but I just registered new domain with weebly and have my first one that now neither one will load any photos. They worked fine 4 days ago but have now stopped. I've put in repeated requests for support and have gotten no replies whatsoever. My RSS feed that was working just fine has suddenly stopped working as well.

A friend of mine who is not a weebly customer or member got onto to weebly yesterday and loaded photos no prob. She also submitted a question to support and got a reply within a couple of hours--and she's not even a customer with weebly websites. Suppport also told her that those with weebly pro got bumped ahead of those who don't have it. So I suppose this means that all my requests over the past several days and weeks will languish out there until I fork out another $60 and there's still no guarantee that my problems will be addressed? Is this proper business ethics?

Groobers

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 09:34:51

Hello David, first of all let me say how much I enjoy using weebly, I created my first site recently www.groobersgallery.weebly.com and just wanted to ask you a quick question about goole adsense.

I was unsure about adsense but decided to give it a go on my Before and After Photo Page. I have added the adds but have received no email from google, and was just wondering if you could tell me how I track if anyone is clicking on the adds and how do you get paid. Also can I pick the adds I want? or are the adds just picked by weebly?

Thanks for your help
Groobers

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Mon, 23 Jun 2008 20:07:12

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Marcus

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 15:33:24

Cool. I just downloaded a copy. Great job!

guest

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 08:28:35

Cool. Also, using verp with exim isn't so bad and works quite well once it is setup