Finally a good bounce manager

[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.