[kmike]

Originally Posted by Logician

Then how can you seperate actual bouncing emails and human beings who thinks they can directly reply an automated email?

Read up on the Return-Path email header. vBulletin puts the bounce email address there, and puts the webmaster address in the From header. The rest is handled automatically by the email software - bounces go to the email specified in Return-Path, replies from the email clients such as Outlook go to the "From" email.

I'm running boards with 50.000 unique daily visitors and believe me it works.

If sweeping the incoming bounces under the carpet works for you, then yes, you can say that. But you should really stop doing the autoresponder thing, it's irresponsible. We have enough spam already clogging the tubes.

vb's "handy" option (which does exactly what my pluggin does btw) has been introduced to vbulletin recently after that article is written.

No, they do completely different things. The vBulletin option does the right thing (see Return-Path), while your plugin substitutes an email address on a single page. It doesn't help to reduce the incoming bounces a little bit - you are essentially discarding them, but before that you spit back an autoresponse which is guaranteed to be read by no one.

The approach described in the first post works - it will reduce the number of bounces with time. The vBouncer product (defunct now AFAIK) worked. And your article should have been titled "Discarding bouncing emails in vbulletin communities".