Managing e-mail Bounce-backs
Chris Busky of the Equipment Leasing Association asked: "We have several e-newsletters that go out weekly to over 9,000 members. We get approximately 500- 700 e-mail bounce-backs each time. Some bounce because servers are down and some are just bad e-mail addresses. How can you tell the difference and how do you handle updating records in your database without having a full-time person handling just bounce-backs?"
Great question, Chris. In answer to identifying bad addresses from downed servers, oftentimes the bounce- back will give you a good clue. For a bad addresses, the message will likely say, "No name found at this domain" or "Host unknown." For a downed server, the message will often say something like "This message did not deliver after five hours of trying. No need to re- send." Once you eliminate the messages due to a downed server, you should find a more reasonable number of addresses to correct.
In addition to handling these bounce-backs manually, there are plenty of web-based e-mail packages that will track bounce-backs for you, and even attempt to re- send those that bounced-back. For example, the service that I use for this newsletter (roving.com) has a "bounce manager" that captures whose e-mail bounced and for what reason (e.g., non-existent address, undeliverable, mailbox full, etc.). This way I can see if the address is bad or just not deliverable at this time. I can delete them all at once, or export them to .csv files to do something else with them.
Eventually the off-the-shelf AMS programs will offer this functionality, but they're not there yet. In the meantime, it might be worth it to investigate these services and do an import/export process for handling your bounces.
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