Managing email in your web app

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Chris Toynbee

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Mar 3, 2012, 3:12:51 PM3/3/12
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Hi all,

I've been thinking about using Postmark (http://
developer.postmarkapp.com) to manage email in my web app and there's
an API to manage bounces.

I was wondering if anyone has any guidelines or experience on the
rules of how to handle bounces. My web app is currently receiving
100's of bounced emails and I've been thinking it might be a good idea
to unsubscribe these people from the email alerts in my system to save
actually sending wasted emails.

This would actually save me money over time if I was using a paid
email service.

Does anyone have any experience or guidelines on best practice for
handling different types of bounces? Postmark list these bounce types:

HardBounce
Transient
Unsubscribe
Subscribe
AutoResponder
AddressChange
DnsError
SpamNotification
OpenRelayTest
Unknown
SoftBounce
VirusNotification
ChallengeVerification
BadEmailAddress
SpamComplaint
ManuallyDeactivated
Unconfirmed
Blocked

Cheers,

Chris.

Glen Barnes

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Mar 6, 2012, 4:02:15 AM3/6/12
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We are using SendGrid which is a similar system and we are coming up against the same issues. We've done a couple of things:

Glen

Henry Maddocks

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Mar 6, 2012, 2:14:19 PM3/6/12
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On 6/03/2012, at 10:02 PM, Glen Barnes wrote:

> We are using SendGrid which is a similar system and we are coming up against the same issues. We've done a couple of things:
>
> • Unsubscribe people who report spam
> • Update peoples email addresses where there is a clear issue (hotmale.com, hotmial.com, hotmail.con all updated to hotmail.com)

Delete any user with a hotmail account because it'll be a spam account.

Jordan Carter

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Mar 6, 2012, 2:21:21 PM3/6/12
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Slight troll?




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Henry Maddocks

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Mar 6, 2012, 7:31:05 PM3/6/12
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On 7/03/2012, at 8:21 AM, Jordan Carter wrote:

> Slight troll?

It's troll week here in Railsland.

Glen Barnes

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Mar 6, 2012, 8:53:17 PM3/6/12
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And Xtra? ;-)

FYI: We have 45 misspellings of xtra.co.nz so far.

"extra.co.nza" => "xtra.co.nz",
"xtra.c.nx" => "xtra.co.nz",
"xtra.co.lnz" => "xtra.co.nz",
"xtra.co.ns" => "xtra.co.nz",
"xtra.co.nx" => "xtra.co.nz",
"xtra.co.nzc" => "xtra.co.nz",
"xtra.co.nzs" => "xtra.co.nz",
"xtra.co.nzx" => "xtra.co.nz",
"xtra.co.zn" => "xtra.co.nz",
"xtra.conz" => "xtra.co.nz",
"xtra.o.nzc" => "xtra.co.nz",

Chris Toynbee

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Mar 6, 2012, 8:54:29 PM3/6/12
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Sounds like an exciting task :)

Nahum Wild

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Mar 6, 2012, 9:53:12 PM3/6/12
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btw, I think there was some discussion a while about about ways to stop spam signups. what I've ended up doing on both ponoko and esdao is have a hidden 'company name' field that if filled in flags it as spam and the user isn't actually created. doesn't stop them from trying though.

--nahum

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Grant McLean

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Mar 6, 2012, 11:31:06 PM3/6/12
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We're in the process of adding some AJAXy goodness to run an MX lookup
and highlight the email field if that check fails. We'll probably still
accept what people provide as long as the TLD is valid but if we can
highlight their typo early we should reduce the error rate.

In response to Henry's trolling, I had a look at @hotmail.com addresses
in our app. Surprisingly, 20% of 'engaged' users (i.e.: users who have
completed the long and tortuous sign-up process) have a hotmail address.
That was much higher than I expected.

Cheers
Grant

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Jared Armstrong

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Mar 8, 2012, 3:40:38 AM3/8/12
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http://developer.postmarkapp.com/developer-bounces.html#bounce-hooks

Receive bounce hook notification, flag relevant user/record as email
bounced, notify accordingly, prevent email sending accordingly, remove
flag once email changed or reactivate bounced address via API if the
user confirms that it is their email.

:)

Jared Armstrong

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Mar 8, 2012, 3:43:56 AM3/8/12
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Honeypot detection works well for us too.

One technique (other than CSS hidden field tempting bot to fill-in) is
disabling a hidden field via javascript, and rejecting any requests
where that field is present.
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