Poor Man's Bounced Email Handler
 

This modification has been replaced by the full Bounced Email Handler. Please use that one instead.


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What does the bounced email handler do?
It stops sending emails to addresses that are no longer valid. This helps keep your email from being marked as spam.

More technically:

1. It collects bounced emails, counts them and marks user accounts as "do not send email".
2. It stops sending "new post" notifications to those addresses.

What it does not do:
It does not stop sending any other emails such as:
- forum subscription updates
- Happy birthday messages
- PM notifications
- other important emails

Why is it a "Poor Man's" bounce handler?
Because this is just a hack. It blocks a lot of emails, but not all that should be blocked. Also, it just leaches off of DBTech's hard work in building a bounce handler as part of his vBMail mod. Still, it is better than nothing, and that is what I had before.

I hope to encourage somebody (like you!) or vBulletin to code something better. I just don't have time to do it myself.


To install:

1. Install DBTech's vBMail. This is required!
2. Set up an email address to handle bounces.
3. Set your vBMail options similar to the ones in poor-mans-reply-all-installation-instructions.txt
4. Install this plugin.

Done!

Please, somebody, create a real bounce handler!
The steps:
0. [s]Get DBTech's permission. If you can't get permission,[/s] rewrite their code.
1. Strip down and modify DBTech's excellent vBMail work to just what we need, see how it works and rewrite it. (Everything leading up to marking users in the user table as "do not email".)
2. Improve it to do a better job of deciding when to mark an email address as a bad. (With some types of responses, you don't need to wait for five bad emails.)
3. Find a way to stop sending other emails that shouldn't be sent such as forum subscription updates and birthday messages.
Can you do just one of these steps? Any help is appreciated.

Special thanks to DBTech for his work. What I did here is really very little. DBTech did the hard work.

Do not install this mod until further notice.

I've discovered a problem that is leading to database errors, but I'm swamped with work and won't be able to investigate a solution for some time.

easy man.... delete the attachment file ;)

Please figure out how to remove the user from the database as well. :)

hope this comes back

I'm sorry. I wish I had time to work on this, but I don't.

I also did some work on exactly this task, also using DBTech's vbmail. The results is a very simple cron task that unsubscribes people. It could easily be copied to handle PM notifications, post reporting and so on:

http://www.dragonbyte-tech.com/f99/t...819/#post50838

I'm not claiming a great mod, but rather a quick hack that has been working for me fine for quite a while now. It would be good to see someone taking it or this mod forward.

Any update on this?

David

I've created a full bounced email handler that I've been using successfully on my site for a few months now. I have been meaning to release it as an add-on here but haven't gotten around to it. If you want it, I'll be happy to send you what we have.

hi mate would you send me this please. thanks