Author Topic: Feature Request: Inboxresponse.com? (Read 6803 times)

lambertb · « **on:** February 16, 2007, 08:43:37 am »

HI Dean,

BounceRemoval.com is now InboxResponse.com.

InboxResponse.com offers remote tracking and notification of successful, delayed, and failed ("bounced") email delivery attempts and ensure that your mailing lists are free of undeliverable email addresses. Our systems automatically receive, parse, sort, notify you, and when using an InboxResponse.com enabled mailing list program, can even automatically remove your bounced addresses from your mailing lists!

Currently, their only "enabled mailing list program" is site interactive and smpro http://www.siteinteractive.com/subpro/

What do you think about something like this for LMPRO integration?

Brian

BGSWebDesign · « **Reply #1 on:** February 16, 2007, 09:28:18 am »

DW,

That sounds amazing, here's the actual link to inboxresponse:
http://www.inboxresponse.com/

How about it DW?

mike2 · « **Reply #2 on:** February 16, 2007, 09:57:55 am »

This seems pretty decent, but this isn't anything Listmail couldn't do right now really...

The only thing I see of huge value is the bounce processing and Listmail does this now on it's own.... albeit it probably could be much better with some generalized daily statistics like this service provides.

As for the DSN part, this is really interesting, but not real valuable IMHO... because even though a mail server accepts the message does not in any way mean the user actually got it.

There are many ( most in fact ) spam filters that process the mail after being received. It will then be trashed completely or whatever....

Even at that, Listmail could with some proly fairly intense modifications do similar reporting. Actually the script Dean posted about checking for blocks kind of does this now...

Just My .02

DW · « **Reply #3 on:** February 16, 2007, 05:09:52 pm »

I signed up to check this out for you guys.

InboxResponse must keep record of the default responses from a huge range of mail server software. With many languages and customized responses this seems an impossible undertaking to me.

I noticed they are using a header addition (let me know if you need help adding that, and I would consider an option you might enable in the config file). When ListMail was created I used headers for bounce processing. I wanted to resend the -same- message that bounced, holding the user in sequence until they were recovered. It wasn't meant to be. Around 40% of servers did not return the headers when they bounced a message, making reliable tracking impossible. This is exactly why the bounce feature was changed to "X times in X days" with all processing being based on the email address itself.

Back to my first point... InboxResponse must either "scan for keywords" or track tens of thousands of bounce responses in order to determine the exact reasons for bouncing (every server has a different way of saying "Server said: 550 user unknown".

This gets me thinking. I could do more research in this area to improve ListMail's bounce tracking and might even be able to achieve some level of success by analyzing the various common email servers (postfix, qmail, sendmail, exim) and scanning their bounces for the numeric error codes. This could result in tracking such as seen on InboxResponse.com. An improvement like this would eliminate the need for a 3rd party such as InboxResponse.com to access your bounces - it would all be handled by ListMail running on your own site.

The ListMail bounce process is being improved for future updates to ignore certain bounces (AOL / Yahoo deferrals, HotMail connection issues, spamblocks, etc - it will be configurable) and again insert a tracking header for those servers that support it. I also plan to improve and include the AOL complaint removal script with ListMail along with instructions.

Regards

BGSWebDesign · « **Reply #4 on:** February 16, 2007, 09:04:20 pm »

DW,

Quote

this would eliminate the need for a 3rd party such as InboxResponse.com to access your bounces - it would all be handled by ListMail running on your own site.

I don't see this as possible at all - are you SUPERMAN? Really, I wouldn't even consider it, it's obvious that inboxresponse.com probably has a team of people (at least 2-3) watching server responses around the globe, and maintaining that list would be near impossible for you, by yourself - give that one up - the second bit I like (see below).

Quote

The ListMail bounce process is being improved for future updates to ignore certain bounces (AOL / Yahoo deferrals, HotMail connection issues, spamblocks, etc - it will be configurable) and again insert a tracking header for those servers that support it. I also plan to improve and include the AOL complaint removal script with ListMail along with instructions

Sounds great, love to see that... please let us know what you find out.