Hi

I am currently involved in helping to specify an e-mail delivery system for a client, and am finding it difficult to find information on how to detect hard & soft bounces of e-mails.

Does anyone have any information on:

• How to detect soft bounces such as: Out of office replies, mailbox full, auto-responders etc.
• How to detect hard bounces such as: Mail account no longer exists, domain invalid, mail server unavailable etc.
• How to deal with the various e-mail responses that mail servers use, especially considering a message such as "Mailbox full" works well for English, but this will not work for other languages.
• Is there a consistent header / error number that can be identified in mail server responses for these bounces?

Any advice on how to find this information, if there are open source tools, 3rd party tools available etc. would certainly be appreciated?

Regards,

Matthew O’Riordan

c: Lemon Foundation - Managed Network for Interactive Production & Design
m: 07930 534 713
d: 020 7071 8605
e:
w: http://www.lemonfoundation.com

Matt,

We use a product called Gammadyne to help us with this problem. As well as handeling all of the sending and recieveing of the emails, it also processes all the bounces and then updates our databases.

While it comes with list of hard and soft bounces, we found the most effective way was to build our own list (after looking long and hard for a list of such a list) , by examining the content of bounced emails.

Now we have built the list, we can handle thousands of bounce messages in minutes and automatically update our database. For example we only remove emails from our database after they have bounced four times and Gammadyne has a great facility that does this for us.

If you need any more information, please contact me directly.

Charles

Charles Meaden - Managing Director
Digital Nation - Intelligent Internet Marketing
ICQ: 152739008
MSN: charles@digitalnation.co.uk
T: +44 (0)208 864 5420
E: charles@digitalnation.co.uk
W: http://www.digitalnation.co.uk

I have now done some research for myself, and it appears there are a good number of options out there, some of them pretty advanced.

The various products I have found are:

Enterprise & Upper Tier Level

1. b*Bounce
   Appears to be a very advanced solution identifying over 2,700 formats.  It runs as its own server application, and will check POP3 accounts for bounces.  Each e-mail check can trigger an event to a database, script etc. which allows you to update your database with number of bounces etc. or remove users from your mailing list.
   This solution appears to be the most developed & established, and feature rich (even includes Challenge-Response completion & automatic updates)
   Most expensive as well starting at $349 for 5 users, and $699 for unlimited users.
   
2. BoogiePop Enterprise  & BoogieBounce 3.6API
   BoogiePop offers both an API version and a server solution (like b*Bounce). Using the API would therefore either require an application build / integration to process your POP3 box, or local e-mail files on the server, but would allow for closer integration with your application.
   Not quite as feature rich as b*Bounce, identifies around 1,500 bounce formats, however for closer application integration with your own bespoke CRM systems this may be a better choice than b*Bounce.
   Enterprise version same prices as b*Bounce at $349 for 5 users, and $699 for unlimited users.
   API version at $349
   
3. Listnanny .NET
   A native .NET component which allows integration of bounce processing & identification within your CRM & e-mail applications. Definitely a great option if you are developing a .NET application and want to quickly integrate this functionality.  Ability to scan folders, files etc. and process e-mails.
   Supports less signatures / formats than BoogiePop or b*Bounce (approximately 1,000+), not sure if updates are included.
   Cheap at $129.
   

Lower Tier

1. E-mail Bounce Handler (Mac OS desktop app)
   A very simple application for bounce processing from the desktop.  Runs on Mac OS.
   $19.90
   
2. G-Lock E-mail Processor
   Well featured desktop-like application, capable of high volumes though.  Pretty feature rich, but definitely more suitable for smaller business with small e-mail lists.
   $99
   
3. Others ..
   I am sure there are others .... including desktop SPAM software which would probably include some of this functionality.

Obviously there are still the other options of using either an off-the-shelf e-mail application or using an ASP e-mail bureau.  I imagine that the larger e-mail bureaus such as ValueClick, DoubleClick, BlueStreak, L-Soft etc. will have dedicated teams ensuring they keep their bounce formats up to date and continuously evolve this, hence having huge accuracy in this area.
Unfortunately for those of us who need closer integration with our own CRM & e-mail systems we will have to rely on 3rd parties to provide this functionality.  Luckily looking at the top 3 listed above, we can access this functionality at relatively low cost...

Matthew O’Riordan

c: Lemon Foundation - Managed Network for Interactive Production & Design
m: 07930 534 713
d: 020 7071 8605
e:
w: http://www.lemonfoundation.com

On 15:10:48 27 August 2004 matt wrote:

Hi

I am currently involved in helping to specify an e-mail delivery system for a client, and am finding it difficult to find information on how to detect hard & soft bounces of e-mails.

Does anyone have any information on:

• How to detect soft bounces such as: Out of office replies, mailbox full, auto-responders etc.
• How to detect hard bounces such as: Mail account no longer exists, domain invalid, mail server unavailable etc.
• How to deal with the various e-mail responses that mail servers use, especially considering a message such as "Mailbox full" works well for English, but this will not work for other languages.
• Is there a consistent header / error number that can be identified in mail server responses for these bounces?

Any advice on how to find this information, if there are open source tools, 3rd party tools available etc. would certainly be appreciated?

Regards,

Matthew O’Riordan

c: Lemon Foundation - Managed Network for Interactive Production & Design
m: 07930 534 713
d: 020 7071 8605
e:
w: http://www.lemonfoundation.com

What you really looking for is database of patterns to detect softbounces. Anyone can compile their own by just looking at subject/body of bounces messages - I did that exercise for my ex-employer (Jungle.com) and after couple of hours I had good enough filter to catch and classify 98% of all responses from 500k mailout, the rest were passed over to CS.

Its pretty easy job, but I guess £100 or so for a product that does that already well is not a bad deal.