Alpha1
Well-known member
- Affected version
- 2.3.7
Some prime examples of dead email domains are:
myspace.com (dead since 2009)
viola.fr (dead since 2016)
wanadoo.co.uk (dead since 2017)
orange.net (dead since 2017)
love.com (dead since 2022)
Emails to these dead email domains result in soft bounces, while these should be hard bounces. Of course these are just a few examples and there are thousands of dead email domains that a big board will deal with.
When an email domain has died / gone away, the DNS lookup will fail and this will result in a soft bounce. Yet it should be a hard bounce in most cases.
A very small percentage of such bounces pertains to cases where the email domain is just temporarily offline. Therefore its somewhat logical that this is classed as a soft bounce. Here is an example of the delivery status notification:
The impact of this on on sender reputation of such dead email domains can be rather large. Especially for big boards and old boards.
Custom email domains are more likely to go offline over the years.
This issue can be resolved in several ways:
myspace.com (dead since 2009)
viola.fr (dead since 2016)
wanadoo.co.uk (dead since 2017)
orange.net (dead since 2017)
love.com (dead since 2022)
Emails to these dead email domains result in soft bounces, while these should be hard bounces. Of course these are just a few examples and there are thousands of dead email domains that a big board will deal with.
When an email domain has died / gone away, the DNS lookup will fail and this will result in a soft bounce. Yet it should be a hard bounce in most cases.
A very small percentage of such bounces pertains to cases where the email domain is just temporarily offline. Therefore its somewhat logical that this is classed as a soft bounce. Here is an example of the delivery status notification:
Code:
Action: failed
Final-Recipient: rfc822; xxx@love.com
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550 4.4.7 Message expired: unable to deliver in 840 minutes.<421 4.4.0 Unable to lookup DNS for love.com>
Status: 4.4.7The impact of this on on sender reputation of such dead email domains can be rather large. Especially for big boards and old boards.
Custom email domains are more likely to go offline over the years.
This issue can be resolved in several ways:
- Implement a list of dead email domains.
- Implement a option/setting to always hard bounce DNS failure.
- HTTP status check on the domain after DNS failure.