Publishing your Newsletter - Undeliverable e-mails

It is not until you send your first e-mail message that you begin to realize that even the freshest list will contain many undeliverable addresses. Most lists - even B2B lists - lose about 30 percent of their addresses in a year. Cleaning up after undeliverable mail won't just be a problem the first time you send - although it will probably be more of a problem with the first mailing than with subsequent mailings - it will be something you have to deal with every time.

Many Flavors of Bounced Messages
When you send your newsletter, you'll supply both a FROM address and a REPLY-TO address for your messages. All automated replies will be sent to the FROM address. These will include all of the following types of automated responses:

New paragraph Undeliverable mail - recipient is not in the address book
Undeliverable mail - the domain does not exist
Undeliverable mail - mailbox is full
Out of office or vacation replies
"John has left the company, please contact Jane for matters related to ..."
New paragraph "John has left the company, you can reach him at ..."
"We have not been able to deliver this message for 24 hours. We will try for three days. You don't need to take any action at this point."

Unique Format for Each ISP
Every ISP generates slightly different subject lines and slightly different formats for their message. Worse yet, you might blindly delete messages that you thought were undeliverable, but that actually had forwarding information. To complicate matters even more, even though you provided a REPLY-TO address for people who wanted to respond to your newsletter, not all e-mail clients actually pick up the REPLY -TO address. Some people who had something to say to you might get their messages and addresses deleted, or might get filtered into the wrong box.

Even finding the e-mail addresses of those whose messages were completely undeliverable is difficult to do in an automated way because many ISPs return the original message as an attachment, and don't even include the undeliverable address in the message they automatically send you. This means you or your software has to open attachments to see whom to unsubscribe. This rapidly becomes a big, ugly job.

Save Time, Keep Your List Clean
It is definitely to your advantage to keep your list clean. If you're sending on your own behalf, using your own software, and you're not paying by the message, then you are still wasting time sending messages and cleaning out your FROM box.

Take advantage of bounce e-mails to keep your mailing lists free of bad addresses...
Maxprog has developed eMail Bounce Handler, a bounce e-mail filtering and handling tool that recognizes bounce e-mails using a customizable set of rules and extracts the recipients addresses allowing you to use them again to try sending your mail or to take them off your list. eMail Bounce Handler simply connects to your POP or IMAP mailbox in order to retrieve bounces letting any other message untouched. Once your mailbox is processed and all bounces removed from your server, you will get your list of "bad" e-mails addresses. Then you can export it in order to clean your original list or to try to send your mail again. If you use Maxprog Bulk Mailer, you can name your file "Delete" and then drop it over MaxBulk Mailer recipient list . All addresses from the file will be removed from the list in a snap!