It will be cool to use this with a feature to send automatic Private Message notification to each users

Very nice to see somethign like this.

How does this addon decide which bounces to act upon? Is it only the number of bounces or does this actually check why an email is bouncing? Even if thats just for email delayed, inbox full and other trivial bounces?

What effect do bounces have on other vbulletin emails to the user? (birthdays, notifications, member email, etc, etc.) If it doesn't affect this, then it only decreases bounced email problems, but doesnt resolve it. Websites would still get blacklisted as spammers if email is still sent to inactive email accounts.

vBMail has a threshold feature, meaning an email address can bounce x amount of times before it will be unsubscribed. It uses the standard bounce header to control what it classes as 'real' bounces, but also (as it uses an IMAP email address) list all emails coming to the bounce email address and allows you to manually mark it as 'bounced' mail (for example mailbox full problems don't count as a bounced mail, but you could set it to bounced after the 72 hours mail that often comes).

Once it's marked a user as bounced and processed them (by hourly cron jobs) it then unsubscribes them from all mail lists AND turns off all the email related features within vB's standard install (I'm not sure how it would fare with any non DBTech mod's email features atm).

1.0.2 Beta 3:
* Fixed a critical security issue regarding guest permissions

Fillip

Can you import a mailing list into it i.e a mailing list generated by vb ?

[high]* TheLastSuperman tags :D[/high]

Not yet, in the future we will be looking to adding support for more types of mailing lists, and that's when we'll be looking at importers :)


Fillip

Thanks Mokonzi. Thats very helpful. Could you elaborate on how it use the bounce header to define a bounce? Does it look for certain phrases? Many bounce headers do not have useful information anymore these days and many email providers use their own system/way to alert about bounced email.

Once vbmail marks a user as having an invalid email account, then is there a possibility for the admin to restrict the account? Such accounts are mainly from inactive users or from spammers / trolls.
My site benefited greatly from restricting accounts with inactive email addresses. Spam and trolling went down drastically.

Great! Will be testing this out later this week

The most common form of bounced mail is one that sends back all the headers that were sent with the original mail.

vBMail adds a specific header which it then checks for in the bounced mail body. If found, it does some validation checks, and if it's valid it flags it as a bounced mail.

Those bounces that do not follow this standard are either discarded (Automatic mode) or flagged as Unknown Mail (Manual mode).

For maximum "cleanliness" you would set it to Manual mode, then manually edit each mail that did not follow the aforementioned standard, ensuring the mail address is correct (for instance, mails that have been delayed 24/48/72 hours will show as originating from Mailer-Daemon@yourdomain.com instead of the bouncee) and setting the bounce flag to yes.

That is not currently possible, due to the fact that there's a chance for false positives (i.e. people using their own domain name's emails, and their site had a temporary problem, or their data center has issues receiving mails from any IP from another data center - this is a real concern, we had this exact issue with Mokonzi himself over there) which would have an adverse effect on a forum.


Fillip