I would like to note the ezbounce feature gets caught alot of time as spam. I have had multiple rejections sent back to me while using ezbounce.

Strange. I have not encountered that. Did you turn off 'Show EZ Bounce link in email message body'?

Note that there are some interesting developments going on in the EZbouncd topic now. With a little help, the whole bounced email processing might get automatized through the combination of EZBounce, eMail Bounce Handler with Macro Express.

very helpful information, thank you

This never got off the ground. A full solution to handle bounced email is still needed. The best option that admins have at this time is to use EZBounced and handle all bounced email manually. Even when this means thousands of bounced mails.

Man that's rough, having to go through thousands of emails manually

Yes, i went trough 20.000 emails in a year. Really sucks. But not as much as your new members never getting their email. Cause you will likely not find out when that happens and that problem will seriously delay the growth of your site.

how you check the open relays connections?

im kinda new :S

Normally an open relay would mean that your smtp mail server accepts requests without authorization. i.e. anybody can access it and send email from it. This can be tested through many online site. Google it.

With vbulletin and its addons however, there are other open relay options, trough pages that have a function to send email. Make sure that guests can not use the 'Use Email to Friend' function anywhere on your site. I'd recommend turning this off for newbies as well.

Then go to your catchall email address. This is the standard email address where all bounced email arrives at. Often this is user@domain.com Ask your host if you do not know.

Have a look at the emails that got bounced and should not have sent by you. You may see spam sent from your server, that was then bounced back to your catchall address, because the addressee does not exist. This is where it gets interesting.
Review the message, the headers and the raw view. Find the path used to send the email and specifically the mail script that was used. The mail script often indicates that there is a script in one of your add-ons that allows spammers to send email through your site.

See if you can identify the script and the addon it is part of. If so, then first see if you can correct this by changing the setting of that addon. If yes, then post about it in the relevant thread on vb.org to give others a heads up. If not, then let the coder know that there may be a problem with the addon, by posting in the relevant thread.

I recently sent out a mass email from the admin control panel and was surprised that there wasn't any kind of unsubscribe message tacked onto the end like there is when members email one another.

is there an easy way to add this or do I need to remember to manually add it myself each time I send an email. are there any hacks for something like this?

thanks in advance

Fortunately Kirk made this hack: Unsubscribe link in Administrative Mail
However, you still need to add a text manually, like described in my article.