Need help with Email Bounces and List Hygiene

[suzanne]

Hi,

I am hoping someone can shed some light into a question I have about our ESP, <WidgetMail>. After researching the subject and becoming more familiar with the importance of bounce handling, I asked our <WidgetMail> resource if we could obtain delivery reporting that gave us specific reasons as to what emails to which ISP's were bouncing and why.

I then learned that <WidgetMail> does not provide this reporting on a detailed level - they only do this at the aggregate because they find their clients "don't use the information - or find it too confusing." (that in itself seems odd to me..)

This leads into my next question. We'd like to do some hygiene on some of our lists and attempt to find valid email addresses for our "invalids". The vendor we work with is suggesting we do an append since it is less expensive than ECOA. If we attempt to append our "invalids" that may include bounces, are we essentially paying for email addresses of customers that just don't want to hear from us? (Or also perhaps ISP's that just don't like email from our particular <WidgetMail> IP address?)

I feel like I really don't have enough information to make a good decision. Because we don't get detailed bounce reporting, we don't know how many emails are bouncing because our email is blocked for one reason or another.

Anyone have any thoughts on how we can go about this hygiene process in a successful way? (or comments on the bounce handling by WidgetMail?)

Thank you so much for your time.

Suzanne

PS - My company would like to utilize an "opt-out" strategy with our Append list, which introduces yet another tier of questions. Has anyone else had any experience (good or bad) trying an append and purchasing all emails of customers that that don't respond to opt-out?

[carfac]

Hi:

I do not know how big your list is, or how frequent your mailings- both of which could be big factors in the number of bounces you get each mailing.

I do all my mailings locally. That way I have complete control over all aspects of it... and I get all bounced e-mail.

Like you, I am concernbed about spam, and make it VERY easy to opt-out. Every e-mail I send has opt-out links on them, and these remove the person from the mailing list immediately (actually, they set a flag to NOT e-mail, but I keep the info)

I would suggest this sort of approach. When you get the e-mail bounced, you can click on that link yourself, and remove (or disable mailings) for that person.

dave

[cfx211]

I just started in on this same issue about a month ago at my company. We saw that in March 3/4 of people pulled off lists were emails bouncing and the rest were unsubs. I think part of the problem in sorting out your bounces is that postmasters at each domain all return different messages on why you bounced, i.e. user not known vs. user not found. This makes it hard to easily aggregate, which is probably why your provider does not do it.

I would either try forcing your provider to aggregate for you, or take a small but representative portion of your list and mail them yourself. Then wade through and categorize the bounces yourself.

Unfortunately this is a messy issue and I imagine that your provider is not to keen to help you pare down your list because they get paid per message sent. You might just have to be stubborn about it until you get the facts you need.

[rfontaine]

I use an IMAP mail server and was able to write a PHP script using PHP IMAP functions. When an email from our daily headlines email bounces, I store its id# and date in a database table. If an addresses bounces for more than a week or so in a row I delete it.