Implemented Bounced Email Management

[Alpha1]

Please do not forget bounced email processing. The absence of bounced email processing in vbulletin has led to a large number of boards being blacklisted as a spammer. As a result their members do not receive emails from the board.
vbulletin is one of the largest spammers on the internet, breaking a large number of laws.

Its important that XenForo does not make this mistake.

 

[Green Cat]

+1.
BTW thanks for the "How not to get blacklisted" thread at vb.

 

[Alpha1]

You're most welcome. I really think its only a matter of time before vbulletin is taken to court over this, as not having such functionality is breaking a large number of national and international anti-spam laws. IB seems to have realized this.
I think this is very important for XenForo LTD, its customers and its users.

 

[Brandon_R]

Thank you for your suggestion as things like these can get overlooked.

 

[island]

This was mentioned here a bit http://xenforo.com/community/threads/smtp-authentication.568/#post-11808 but I haven't seen a topic on just bounce handling.

This becomes a huge problem once a forum gets of a certain size and age. Dealing with email bounces one by one is time consuming and a thankless task.

It seems with vbulletin a hurdle has been that one solution may not work for all forums given different server types and mail server configurations. There are mods at vBulletin.org that handle this a couple of ways for vBulletin.

I hope we either get some good solid supported email bounce handling modules or supported automated bounce handling mods for xenForo that upon email bounce:
1.) alert the member when they visit the forum that their email is bouncing
2.) pause all notifications/emails sent from xenForo until the email address is updated by the member

 

[James]

I also think a domain check should be issued on the e-mail address (me@domain.com - domain.com should be checked to see if it's a valid domain) .

 

[Ahmed]

+1.
That is a very important feature and it's a must-have one for most forum owners.

 

[Ranger375]

+1.
BTW thanks for the "How not to get blacklisted" thread at vb.

Can you link that for me. I actually was blacklisted thanks to spammers, and am tryign to figure out how this happened...

 

[Green Cat]

Can you link that for me. I actually was blacklisted thanks to spammers, and am tryign to figure out how this happened...

Sure, here you go: http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?p=1533552.

 

[Ranger375]

thanks !

 

[keepitcoder]

This would be a very nice feature!

 

[ChemicalKicks]

This is something that really needs looked at imo

 

[Brett Peters]

Another +1

 

[AzzidReign]

Wow, if something like this was built in, xF would be light years further (even further than the current light years ahead of the competition)! This is something almost every site needs, but bigboards especially. I wonder if this will be added *crosses fingers*

 

[Gene Steinberg]

From what I read, one key issue is to have a way to remove email addresses that bounce. In vB, you can set a Bounce Email Address, but the add-on to process those returned messages was never upgraded for vB 4. With our vB forum, we just manually move the member to an Inactive user group (we set it up as the equivalent to a non-member), and will restore their privileges when they let us know about it and, of course, confirm their identity.

We also use a vB product that sends notices to members who haven't posted in a while; it has an opt-out feature. Our newsletters (we use Dada Mail) have double opt-in and opt-out features, and it has a bounce manager too.

XF is basically set up same as vB as to a bounce email address. This would be a great idea for a plugin, to process the bounced messages.

Unless you have a really, really big board, though, you should be able to process the returned messages automatically.

But as to vB breaking spam laws, how does the failure to process bounced email cause a problem unless it's a huge number of emails? I can't see where a handful here and there makes a difference. As to sending out bogus emails, well, it doesn't matter what board system one has; that would be the fault of the owner of the board.

 

[AzzidReign]

I would like it to be integrated in with the notification system. For one, have it move the user to a "Change email address" user group without any posting permissions. On top of that, the user will see a big notification as to why they can't post and what they need to do to be allowed to post again.

 

[Gene Steinberg]

I would like it to be integrated in with the notification system. For one, have it move the user to a "Change email address" user group without any posting permissions. On top of that, the user will see a big notification as to why they can't post and what they need to do to be allowed to post again.

I like the idea. Are there any add-on developers who can make it so?

 

[ChemicalKicks]

Bounced email is core imo and the system would only need to change the user state for the affected account.

 

[Gene Steinberg]

So is this something an add-on user can do, or must it be done in the software itself? Please clarify.

 

[ChemicalKicks]

So is this something an add-on user can do, or must it be done in the software itself? Please clarify.

It could be either, I think I would prefer to see it in the core than having to rely on an addon. However if push came to shove I would install a 3rd party addon to get the functionality.