[Alfa1]

Originally Posted by ferreo

I had my resident coder come up with a small script to battle the years-long issue with bounced emails.

This script has no fancy plugin integration with vB, it runs as a simple PHP cron once ever X hours and does some very simple DB adjustments to avoid that our forums mail an invalid/inactive/full mailbox again.

It connects to an IMAP bounce address, polls the emails that are contained in the bounces, finds the accounts in the users table, removes the email address and dispatches a PM to the user to let them know what is up. Then it deletes the email from the IMAP. It also logs all the activity in a flat text log file.

We tried some other approaches but decided that this would be the most efficient way to purge invalid emails from our forums which would hurt our mailing efforts in the long run and have us be more likely to be marked on spam/bulk filters. The user will also retain any custom usergroup s/he may be in after updating the email address to a new one. vB is clever like that.

I am not really up-to-date with the efforts to battle the bounce issue in vBulletin 3.x branch, and instead of seeking, I rather had something custom done.

Note: not trying to have cheep skript 4 sell here. Just sharing insights.

Could you share this script? So far I have seen no real solution for this problem.
Have you read my article:
How to keep your board from getting blacklisted as a spammer

Originally Posted by Logician

* I create post_bot@mydomain.com email address with an autoresponder tied in it. Whenever it receives an email, it returns an reply telling that this email address is not used, nor monitored and asks contacter to use contact_me@mydomain.com if she tried to reach me. This makes sure if somebody accidently emails me in this email address, she knows I didn?t get the reply and she also knows where to mail me to reach me.

It is quite beyond me why you would do this. I get thousands of bounces per month, but there rarely is a real reply among them, It seems a waste of effort.
More importantly, it means that you are hitting non-existent addresses an extra time. This will increase the chance of your domain getting blacklisted.

I dont see how the recommendations help in any way to avoid blacklisting as a spammer? They do seem to make things worse.