Invalid Email Notifier - Increase Member Participation
 

First things First ! This mod is useless to you if you do not visit the users profiles with undeliverable mail and remove the email account . This mod lets users of any group but guests know there email was removed . it adds a message under the nav bar linked to the edit email page that stays there until they update it.


Tired of returned mass emails ? Tired of fake email registration ? With a little bit of effort and this modification you can clean up your mailing lists and be sure to contact your users about important updates . Nothing pegs the users online like a mass email to your users about recent events , giveways and ect. when you try to send 10,000 emails and get 200 emails back undeliverable it can be a major headache , add to this the wasted server resources trying to send email to undeliverable accounts .

Most sites require email verification , its been my experience that when end users want something they want it now so having instant access is a huge plus . however you do get a slew of myname@fakeemail.com registrations , as you see them you can add that email to the list of emails not to accept registrations from , but new ones pop up all the time . Also the email verification can get spammed and you just lost a member!

Not wanting to send mass emails because i knew i would get a ton of undeliverable emails back we started to harvest all the emails that returned undeliverable. then the staff broke up the list and we all went to the users profiles and removed there email addresses and just saved it with no email in there . this allow the mass email engine to bypass them accounts , and takes care of it .

However in the past we didnt realize that embarq black listed us , we deleted all them email accounts before we realized all we had to do was contact embraq and get on the safe sender list , and we did and all is well but we have no way of contacting the members that we removed there emails , cant send them a pm because they dont have an email for it to notify , we did run a short campaign starting at member 1 and going to all profiles with out emails and sending them a pm telling them to update there email account on file , but this way took forever and your still just banking on them visiting and reading the email then following the instruction .

We needed a more firm way to contact members whos emails we removed , and the 50 or so emails we have to remove with every new mass email .

A lot of the time the user just forgot he changed his email . they come in to a giveaway thread once its over and upset that they didnt know about it . we tell them we mass emailed everyone so if you didnt know about it its not our fault .. Happens all the time .

Anyway Looking for a better way to let users know there email has been removed because it was undeliverable , i came to vb.org . https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=216859 User : Carnage- told me the conditional for members with no email on file . and i took the ball and ran with it ...

I just added it to my site and tested it and it works great as soon as you are on an account with no email on file the notice is there , and once you click it and edit your email then the notice goes away AWESOME!

And this is how to do it.

1. Send a Mass Email and save all the undeliverable email notifications
2. Harvest all the email accounts from the undeliverable email notifications and build a list
3. Split up the work load to the staff and have them go to the control panel and go to Users/Search for Users
4. Search for the emails on your list
5. Enter the user profile and delete the email adress and hit save
6. Repeat till all are removed
7. Apply this modification
8. A Month or so later send a mass email and notice that you didnt get any undeliverable and more people actually got your email - If you did get any undeliverable emails then they were newly registered users
9. SUCCESS !

Note this also works if you do have email verification at registration , because people change emails all the time or abandon old accounts . you will be put back in touch with these users !

Here you will see a user profile with no email account on file , it was removed because it was deemed undeliverable by vbulletin mass email system ..

http://www.dieselbookmarks.com/bombers/usermanager.png

This is what the end user sees at this time

http://www.dieselbookmarks.com/bombe...dinnoemail.png

When they click on the notification it takes them to the edit email page ...

http://www.dieselbookmarks.com/bombers/emailedit.png

Once they edit there email the notice goes away and all is well

To perform this you need to edit the navbar template

Find:

HTML Code:

---

<!-- / notifications menu -->
</if>

---

And add this after it...

HTML Code:

---

<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<if condition="$bbuserinfo['userid']">
  <if condition="$vbulletin->userinfo['email'] == ''"><div align="center">
        <p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><span class="style1"><strong>
      <img src="http://www.YOURSITE.com/images/icons/icon4.gif" alt="ATTN" />
        <font color="#FF0000">YOU DO NOT HAVE A VALID EMAIL ACCOUNT ON FILE</font>    <img src="http://www.YOURSITE.com/images/icons/icon4.gif" alt="ATTN" /></strong></span></div>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
</p>
<p class="style1" align="center" style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><b>
<font color="#FF0000">
<a target="_self" href="http://www.YOURSITE.com/profile.php?do=editprofile">
CLICK HERE NOW TO UPDATE YOUR EMAIL ACCOUNT ON FILE - YOUR EMAIL MAY OF BEEN REMOVED  BECAUSE IT WAS UNDELIVERABLE USERS WITH AN INVALID EMAIL WILL BE  INDEFINITELY DISQUALIFIED FROM ALL GIVEAWAYS, PERKS AND DISCOUNTS!
</a></font></b></p>
<p class="style1" align="center" style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><b>
<font color="#FF0000">
<a target="_self" href="http://www.YOURSITE.com/profile.php?do=editprofile">
WHEN YOU UPDATE YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS THIS NOTICE WILL GO AWAY.</a></font></b></p>
<div align="center">
        <p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><span class="style1"><strong>
      <img src="http://www.YOURSITE.com/images/icons/icon4.gif" alt="ATTN" />
        <font color="#FF0000">YOU DO NOT HAVE A VALID EMAIL ACCOUNT ON FILE</font>    <img src="http://www.YOURSITE.com/images/icons/icon4.gif" alt="ATTN" /></strong></span></div>
  </if>
  </if>

---

Edit the YOURSITE parts in the code above , you may need to adjust the image path it uses default vbulletin images , as well you may need to adjust the loaction of your edit profile page .

This will not show to guest and it only shows to account with no email on file

This is very nice. I did not remove the email addresses yet, but I'm going to now. We only have users which abandon email addresses because they change provider, but this is nice to get them "back on track" again!
Thank you!:)

This is very nice mod indeed.. I like it,.. I will be checking it out soon

Thanks

It going to take some work by staff to remove all the undeliverable emails but once you get the initial brunt of them there will be only a hand full with each new mass email and its completely manageable .

If vbulletin would remove bounced emails and notify the user of this situation instead for keep trying to email to them OVER AND OVER for thread notifications and pm's and mass emails ect... this mod wouldn't be needed at all .

What a waste of resources when the system is trying to email to accounts that you know are invalid !

there must be a setting some where on vbulletin or server side that states rather you wish to receive undeliverable email notifications . i did not get them on my VPS but i get them on my dedicated so im thinking this is server side , i suggest turning this on so you can identify the invalid emails your users have and prompt them to update/repair them.

Seems to work nice. However, it would be nicer if it was made as a product with language support. Maybe a nice idea for the future?

If you know how to do that your welcome to do it

Nice work and thanks for sharing. I wish vbulletin had something like this by default. It would save so much time. I don't think I have the time to go through and remove all the invalid email addresses that get bounced one by one.

you will only have to do it once and it will increase your responses to mass emails and put you back in touch with your members , thread subscriptions and pm notifications ect they could be missing while your email server is hitting dead end roads

Only if the actual members are signing on to your site. Some members forget they are registered on a site so they will never see the message. But atleast you will not get all the returned emails and potentially get blocked by mail servers.

Yes they have to log back in to get prompted to update there email ,

sort of difficult to contact these members by email and let them know there email is wrong, i tried and it came back undeliverable :)

Thanks a lot, I desperately needed one!

Note: this also takes care of MAIL BOX IS FULL , when the user sees the message they check there email and see its full :D

Welll that's a problem them, because it IS an existing email address.
If you remove those from the database, they have to go through the validation again. They won't like that.

No sorry, I'm no coder, I don't know how to do that.:)

Thanx! Just what I was lookink for!

if there mail box was full chances are they dont use it anyway , and i dont require validation so they can empty there inbox and put there email addy back in

i got half a million members, say 100,00 are fake emails, does that mean i got to edit 100,00 users?

I like this template edit. I modified the wording and look of the notification to better suit the forum where I was making the template edit and it works very well.

Thank you.

You have 500,000 members and 100,000 of them have invalid emails ? How do you know that? and if thats true , you need to delete the fake email from there account and install this modification and when they log in they will see the big notice until they edit there email then it will go away by its self

nice little bit of code. I'll use it.

however I'll let the "staff" stay home on thanksgiving to eat turkey and in about 30 minutes I'll write some php code to lookup each bounced account from the user table and set the email address to null.

have a great one!

if anyone is interested I'll be happy to post the php code I wrote to scour the linux /var/log/maillog file and find all bounces and then lookup that user record in the user table and set the email to NULL.

let me know

It took me about an hour to write the code and test it. I have about 20,000 members over the last 7 years and I just reset about 3,500 email addresses.

ps: dieselminded. I've got a Ram 3500 Dually - Cummins of course!

as an fyi - I'm going to add on to what I started and extend by php program that parses the /var/log/maillog file to do it daily, keep track of the number of emails sent to each member and the number of bounces sent to each member.

If a forum member has a bounce on 5 different days then I'll set their email address to blank. This way I can avoid setting their email to blank if they get just one bounce. This is beause there are often legitimate bounces such as soft bounces because their inbox is full, their service provoider's email server may be offline etc. Therefore if we cannot contact them on 5 different days (over any span of time) then we'll clear their email address.

HOWEVER - if we do deliver an email successfully, then thy bounce-count will get reset to zero and the bounce count starts all over again

:)

feel free to release a mod including all you have done with this my diesel brother .

I will go and try this mod, but i think it will be a lot off work.
I allready have more then 200 invallid adresses on 7000 members.
But the most use a temporary mailing adress, like Hotmail and after a month or what, they remove the adress and get a new one.
Maybee copy/paste all the adresses and let my moderators help.

Thanks anyway.

Sailnet - did you ever release your idea as a mod ?

Also, where do i check to see which mails are bouncing ?

If It would be a automated script,

1 - Bounce Mail Comes
2 - Script handles all bounced mails
3 - Finds the users and deletes after approve from database

Would be Great for everyone