Implemented Bounced Email Management

Alpha1

Alpha1

Well-known member
Licensed customer
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.
 
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@Super120 and @Biarritz64
Your posts did absolutely nothing towards seeing this feature included. Doing a #1 means nothing as far as going toward it being implemented. ;)

Like the first post if you want to see it. That way they know it's a more requested feature.
 
The fact that xenforo has a bounced email status for the user leads me to believe that 'some' thought is being put into this... the foundations are laid. It would be helpful if @Mike or @Kier could clarify if anything further is likely to come in this area?
 
The bounced mail status is so that you can easily change the user accounts to this status. XenForo then handles the rest.

It's just tricky to figure out the user accounts to which the emails bounce back.

It's very server dependant how to figure out whether an email bounced. There are different approaches: You either check your own admin mail account and go to the bounced mails bit by bit (that's a huge hassle for large communities), check the mailserver log or check the inbox of a special bounce mail address.
 
I'm running into issues where some of the bigger mail providers (yahoo and gmail come to mind) have gone to a process of blocking that is completely automated. I have a user with a valid yahoo address and yahoo thinks anything from the forum to that address is spam. I get a delayed delivery notice, but if you read the actual text, it's really telling you it'll never be delivered and tough luck. I have yet been able to find a link/contact to contest that type of bounce.

And don't get me started on gmail. After years and years of getting server generated messages to my gmail account (security logs, backup reports, etc.), Google started blocking them last summer. After 3 months of fighting it, I finally gave up and changed email providers. At least Microsoft gives you an option of contacting a real person as a last resort to get things resolved. Something Google and Yahoo have failed to do.

Based solely on that, I'd be cautious of wanting the forum to automate any type of action based on bounced emails. If things were to go down this road, I'd prefer that a list/report be generated that required a human to perform any account actions.
 
SPIF records have been in place forever. Guess I should break down and get DKIM working on the server. **sigh**
 
Biker said:
I'm running into issues where some of the bigger mail providers (yahoo and gmail come to mind) have gone to a process of blocking that is completely automated. I have a user with a valid yahoo address and yahoo thinks anything from the forum to that address is spam. I get a delayed delivery notice, but if you read the actual text, it's really telling you it'll never be delivered and tough luck. I have yet been able to find a link/contact to contest that type of bounce.

And don't get me started on gmail. After years and years of getting server generated messages to my gmail account (security logs, backup reports, etc.), Google started blocking them last summer. After 3 months of fighting it, I finally gave up and changed email providers. At least Microsoft gives you an option of contacting a real person as a last resort to get things resolved. Something Google and Yahoo have failed to do.

Based solely on that, I'd be cautious of wanting the forum to automate any type of action based on bounced emails. If things were to go down this road, I'd prefer that a list/report be generated that required a human to perform any account actions.
Click to expand...
I would highly recommend looking into a hosted email service like SendGrid. My forum sends over 100k emails per month and, after having dealt with all of the massive headaches with email deliverability issues similar to what you described, I find that it's more than worth the price of their services (or another service like theirs).

Email isn't something most forum owners think about, but it should be, and it can become a massive headache as your site grows.
 
Handling bounced emails needs to be core. Xenforo should not pass the buck of responsibility
 
Dakis said:
How did you integrate sendgrid with xenforo ?
Click to expand...
I wrote a custom script for use with their Event Webhook API. When a user's email bounces or gets blocked, they send a request back to my script, which looks up the user in the XF database and de-activates their account.

I'm using a custom script because I am using Postfix on my server to connect to SendGrid and send emails (so the processing burden is not on PHP). However, if you are interested in this (and really, as I said, any prudent forum administrator should be), an easier way to get started would be to use this add-on created by @xfrocks.
 

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