Mail list validating

[Tuga]

I have a mail list of 30k members , but 20% are fake adresses and I get a lot of bounces when I send a newsletter. What's the easiest way to test the list and remove the bad emails?

[folofolo]

You can try Advanced Maillist Verifier from mailutilities.com. It's good for small lists such as yours, it performs an SMTP verification which might get the checking IP blocked on some mail servers if a lot of the emails are on the same domain. So you might wanna check through a proxy or using another IP than the one sending out the emails.

[dust]

Hello,
I am a newbie , and it's amazing that my first post is an answer and not a question!!

Tuga, I also have a mailing list (with portuguese addresses) just a little bit larger than yours (120k) and I also had the same problem you had. I also tried the High speed verifier from MailUtilities.com, but it was of no use. It just checked the domain name, not the email account. That is if you have the email [email protected] it will evaluate to true, as the program only checks for the domain name...

I found that it was easier to just email the hole list, and then remove from the list the returned emails. But you better code a script to do that for you, or it's going to be a pain in the ass...

__________________________________________________
A newbie on the rice! Or is it rise? Damn you english teacher!

[dust]

By the way... which tool are you using to send the emails? Don't tell me that you are using outlook...

[folofolo]

I didn't say that he should try the high speed verifier, i said that he should try the advanced maillist verifier. two different products.

[dust]

sorry!
I'll also have a look at that Advanced email verifier...

[SplitInfinity]

The best way to keep bounces out of your life is to process the return emails
automatically based on a scoring method.

The way I do it for customers with large lists is as follows....

When the inital mail is sent, we add our own header that is unique, such as:
X-SplitInfinity: shjene9934-2

In that header, there are two items, one, which is the email address we sent the mail to "scrambled" as a code so we know what the original To address was....
And a dash, then a number representing how many bounces have happened on this particular email address.

What we do is simple....
We have a database of all the email addresses and a field called bounces....
When we send the email, we set the errors-to headers to a special email address
which is an automatic bounce filter system.... [email protected]

Note: We do not use procmail since if you process many many many many emails and many many many bounces come back, it could literally overload your server with procmail processes....

Instead, we dump all the email inbound to [email protected] into its inbound mail file.... basically its a regular email account.

We run a cron job every hour that goes through the inbox for that email
account (for example, /var/spool/mail/no-reply) and scans the entire folder
for the special header X-SplitInfinity:. When it finds it, it checks the record
in the database for that email address by descrambling that email address, looking it up in the DB and incrementing the bounces field entry....

IF, and only IF, that particular email address has bounced more than our threshold time (we choose 3 times to give them a three strikes chance)
then the email address is suspended from the database and never used again.

Checking for those headers in the inbox file for the no-reply email account
is as easy as a grep:

grep X-SplitInfinity: /var/spool/mail/no-reply
Which woulc produce results such as:

X-SplitInfinity: jeejkjek-2
X-SplitInfinity: 3j390usssss2-1
X-SplitInfinity: dklnm309ufu-1

and etc.....

so you are not really dealing with all the content of the entire email that is bounced to you, just the headers we implicitly put there.

:-)

Any questions? Hit me up on AIM: NJesterIII or ICQ: 64791506

Need hosting? Dedicated servers? Hit me up!

Regards,
Chris Jester
SplitInfinity

[folofolo]

Yeah processing bounces is absolutely the best way. But it's not that easy if you haven't done it before.

[dust]

bounce is for the pros. Me, being a newbie, it's just plain Outlook and Visual Basic...

[pornguy]

darn, bounces are a pain in the arse