How to best deal with bouncing email addresses?
 

I've got a forum with 27,000+ members. Over the years a fair number of those email addresses have gone bad for one reason or another. I routinely pull email lists and do mailings outside vB. From those mailings I have a list of bad emails (ones that have bounced, etc.) I'd like to take that list and downgrade those users from "Registered Users" to "Awaiting Email Confirmation" but I have no clue how to do that. I also want to make sure that if they've subscribed to any threads via email that those subscriptions are downgraded so emails aren't sent (if that doesn't automatically happen when downgrading their status to "Awaiting...").

Over the years I've tried to keep an eye out here for solutions, but haven't seen any that addressed my particular problem. I find it hard to believe others haven't needed to fix this issue - so just wondering what people do to deal with members' bad email addresses?

Oh yeah, I'm running v4.2.1.

This mod may help you out, I don't believe it will downgrade users, but it will handle the bounced emails, [DBTech] vBMail v1 (vB4)

It appears that mod uses "Poor Man's Bounced Email Handler" to deal with bounced emails and that mod has a rather desperate sounding plea in it's description of "Please, somebody, create a real bounce handler!" which doesn't fill me with confidence that any of that will do a good job handling bounced emails. Bottom line that MIGHT work, but it sounds like a kludge at best.

With all the vB boards out there, how is it that this hasn't been dealt with yet?

Dbtech mods are the best around

No it handles it just fine, they are just saying, that is a another mod you can add, so if A don't catch it B will.