Re: tracking Mials Which were bounced.

mike wrote: > Seems like the general way is to create a mailbox (POP3 or IMAP) to > accept the bounces, then check it periodically and mark the emails as > invalid in your local database. > > I would set threshholds so you don't mark something failed that only > bounced once - it could have been a mail setup error or something > else; I'd say wait for 3 failures in a 7 day period at least. If you > get 3 bounces by that point, the address is probably safely dead. > > You can use PHP's IMAP functions to check the mailbox (even for POP3) > or a million classes or your own functions directly on the socket > (POP3 is a simple protocol) - it also helps if you parse the bounced > email message to process the return address and the mail code; perhaps > build something better than just 3 failures = invalid, but actually > determine if they're full out failures, or if they're just temporary > bounces, etc. I use this method and it works reasonably well. The hard part is the last sentence - there are so many ways to say "mailbox full" - half don't include smtp error codes, the rest tell you the same thing in thousands of different ways. -- Postgresql & php tutorials http://www.designmagick.com/