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We've got a web app with nothing fancy in terms of email notifications. It would be nice to know if an end user entered email address is errant and deliveries to it bomb.

In the modern world of spam infected email, is it still worth trying to catch bounces? In mail server configuration today, its generally considered best practice not to send back bounce emails for unknown recipients due to backscatter, etc.

So, is trying to catch any delivery failures outside the simplest cases (like bad domain, which your local outgoing email server should be able to tell you) really worth the effort?

Kevin Reid
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Jason Crowther
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  • Would you do anything with those bounces? What advantage would you gain by catching them? I've always assumed that email is inherently unreliable and users rely on it at their own risk. If they enter a bad email address or use an unreliable email service, it's their concern. Just keep records of communications locally for history/reporting purposes. – David May 21 '12 at 13:13
  • well, I guess that our app does something a little fancy. when a bounce happens, it triggers some workflow to do some clean up stuff and let somebody know what happened. – Jason Crowther May 21 '12 at 13:18

2 Answers2

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Bounce Management makes a huge difference, lets say you're a company that sends 50,000 emails a month for newsletters or receipts. If a certain Email Server lets say "mx.maildomain.com", bounces an email, hard or soft. And if "mx.maildomain.com" server has advance spam filtering techniques deployed on it. And you repeatedly send the same user over and over again, because you mail out a weekly newsletters. Then "mx.maildomain.com" might decide, you're a spammer and then most of your emails will end up in the junk folder (Including your receipts to other customers on that mail server) or you can end up getting blacklisted.

But more importantly, is Email Feedback Loops , you should definitely set those up. This tells you what users clicked the "Spam" button on the email you sent out. This can be way more damaging then bounces. If people repeatedly mark your emails as spam, it's the best way to get blacklisted. I set them up for my company, even with the proper opt-out links, I couldn't believe how many people click the spam link on my monthly newsletters, they signed up to. It was shocking to see. It took a while to delete all those users from my list, but it's worth the time.

Andrew Barber
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Henry
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  • Great comments, thanks. In our case, we're not sending newsletter type emails, but stuff that's workflow related and in theory less likely to get flagged as spam by the recipient. but, using feedback loops would be helpful in confirming that theory. – Jason Crowther May 23 '12 at 12:32
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If you are sending email notifications to registered users you should do a email verification on signup to make sure they give you a legit email account.

Tracking bouches can be useful depending on your business. If it's very important that your emails to users gets received, like in the case of notification of payments due or sent, then it's worth the effort to track and report of failed emails. Helps save customer support time dealing with people complaining about not getting paid or forgetting to pay and claiming they were never notified.

I once worked at a place where this was the case, we setup a 3 strikes system that after 3 failed/bounced emails we would lock the users account and require them to reverify a valid email to continue to do business with us.

Alan Barber
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  • in this system, the recipients aren't registered in the normal sense. they only interact with the system through the emails, themselves. they do not have a log in on the system. having a verification step when the recipients are created is worth thinking about some more. thanks! – Jason Crowther May 21 '12 at 13:42