Email address check

[ibaker]

My site has been going for about 18 years and has around 12,000 users. I am wanting to clean it all up first and then send an email to users that have not been on the site for some time just to let them know the site is still going and the extra features we now have. However, many user email addresses are no longer valid. So I want to remove those users from my site, which frees up some valuable popular user names, before I send out an email.

One problem that I have found is that many ISPs use an anti spam filter so once they get several emails to no longer existent email addresses they bounce back all emails coming from my site to real users for a period of time which doesn't tell me which addresses are truly non existent any more. This also stops valid users from getting my site update email. For example the bounce back I get from these ISPs is a 550 error specifically saying that I have sent emails to too many invalid recipients:
xxx@internode.on.net
SMTP error from remote mail server after initial connection:
host ipmailmx.internode.on.net [192.231.203.138]:
550 Too many invalid recipients

Can anyone offer suggestions on how I can ascertain which email addresses are no longer valid for my users...thanks for your help

 

[Kevin]

You'll want something like this from @TickTackk ...

Unmaintained - Email List Verify Integration

Screenshot: Description: Integration with Email List Verify service. API Key: API Key is only for registered users. If you have already registered an account at Email List Verify website then you can login here and if not then signup here...

xenforo.com

... and you've reminded me that I have to circle back around to cleaning up my own site as well and finish testing that add-on out.

 

[delicatebobster]

I always use https://debounce.io to check my emails and keep my lists valid and up to date, they are the cheapest I found and works perfectly

Just to give you an idea, my 13-year-old big board with 100k users had 30k invalid emails, if I would have sent the emails without cleaning the list first I would have been banned/blacklisted

So always very important to keep your email lists clean and up to date

 

[ibaker]

Thanks Guys, but I have to wonder about the security of my users email addresses with these types of solutions...your thoughts?

 

[Sim]

SparkPost also offer a similar service (more expensive than Debounce though). In this case, their privacy statement will cover any concerns you have - after all, they are an ESP and you'd be sending emails via their service which necessarily requires them to have access to the email addresses!

You'd have to assume (and check!) that a service like Debounce would have a pretty solid privacy statement in place given that is their core business.

 

[ibaker]

Well I ran them all through debounce and from a total of 11,925 I got:
77% or 9,153 as Valid email addresses
8% or 981 as Invalid addresses
7% or 807 to Catch All addresses
8% or 970 to Unknown so need to be manually checked
15 addresses to Disposable or short time limited addresses

So a big job ahead of me. I have created a Invalid Email Address usergroup, limited their access and a big message saying that their email address is invalid, change it and notify me. I will however delete all users in that group that have a 0 message count. The problem is sitting here and manually looking up each one and changing their usergroup (981 of them).

Delete the 15 users with Disposable email addresses

Not sure what to do with the users with Unknown addresses (970 of them)

Not sure what to do with the users with the Catch All addresses (807 of them)

Once I have acted on all of the above I will be able to send out an email to try and get the users back to the site with out the fear of my email address from getting black listed

 

[ibaker]

I always use https://debounce.io to check my emails and keep my lists valid and up to date, they are the cheapest I found and works perfectly

Just to give you an idea, my 13-year-old big board with 100k users had 30k invalid emails, if I would have sent the emails without cleaning the list first I would have been banned/blacklisted

So always very important to keep your email lists clean and up to date

Do you just remove the invalids? what do you do about the Unknowns and Catch-All's?

 

[Sim]

Catch-All's

Catch-all's aren't necessarily invalid - you'd need to assess them on a case-by-case basis.

There's nothing wrong with having a policy which treats those as inappropriate addresses if that suits your audience. In my case, a lot of my members operate small businesses and will sign up with an info@ or admin@ or sales@ email address, so I treat them as valid.