Ben Forta

6 responses to “Rocks!”

1. 

   Jason

   2004-03-10

   Ben, Out of curiosity how do you handle bounce backs?

   Reply
2. 

   paul stewart

   2004-03-10

   yeah i’d like to know that too..

   Reply
3. 

   Ben Forta

   2004-03-10

   Not easily. I don’t send out mailings often enough to invest the time to do it properly, but …
   1) I have a rule that moves any bounces to a specific POP mailbox (this is pre CFMX6.1 code, in 6.1 I’d not need that rule, I could use FAILTO="" to specify that mailbox).
   2) A scheduled event uses <CFPOP> to retrieve all bounce messages.
   3) Most bounces are either "unknown user" or "unknown host". For the former I increment a counter in the mailing list table, when the counter hits 3 I no longer include them in the mailing. For the latter I generate a row in a "to be looked at" table, and at some point I manually check whether or not those domains exist (and if not I kill any accounts in it).
   4) Other messages (forwarding messages, ooo, mailbox full) I handle manually as there are so few of them.
   It is not ideal, but it works, and my bounce rate is about 10% (much lower than industry averages of 30+%).

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4. 

   JohnB

   2004-03-10

   Ben,
   FYI – on your RSS feed it seems to omit the <> tags and everything between them in the subject, so when you read the thread title it’s just ‘Rocks!’ I thought you were taking a trip into Geology!!!

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5. 

   Ben Forta

   2004-03-10

   John, shows up with the tags on mine. What reader are you using?

   Reply
6. 

   JohnB

   2004-03-11

   Ben, I’m using the RSS Reader panel plugin for Firefox and also Newz Crawler – both do the same thing.

   Reply