XF 2.0 Need help! bounced emails

[Jimmy19]

Hi guys,

I ran into a bad situation but i really need some help to implement some good practices to make sure this doesnt happen again. I recently noticed I was getting a lot of bounced emails from my forum. I contacted my host and they said that microsoft has recently blacklisted my server because of the recent batch of bounced emails from one hotmail address. This came from a user who was subscribed to like 72 threads, but their hotmail address became invalid. Even though they weren't part of the conversation anymore, their email was bouncing because of the replies to the threads. My host suggested the following: #1 ban hotmail registrations. #2 I want users to have to manually watch threads instead of automatically subscribing them. How can I ban hotmail registrations? Also, what else can I do to stop massive bounced emails from happening again?

 

[rfc0001]

BTW, looking at those settings again, I think what tripped me up was the "Enable variable bounced email address values" which is what puts a + sign and the user's email address (encoded) after the bounced email address, which is what violates Google's bulk sender recommendations. I suppose I could have just gone to using a static "bounced email address" and automated bounced email handling and probably everything would be alright. It's the variable return address which is bad. On a forum with few bounced emails you can probably do it manually. You may wish to turn on automated bounced email handling and specify a bounced email address (used only for this purpose - not your default forum address) if you get a lot of bounced email. That's what I'll probably do once I've figured out all my email woes (other issues I'm facing is reverse DNS of IP listed in DNS MX record did not match my domain). Fix is to update PTR record to your domain name for your IP (in your host's DNS record not your server's). Unfortunately, GoDaddy refuses to do this for Dedicated IPs - all other hosts will. Also, because the reverse DNS maps to a domain that contains the IP (e.g. s-xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx.ip.godadddy.com), it's blacklisted in SORBS DUHL (Dynamic Users Host Lists) as a dynamic IP which are automatically blocked since spammers could otherwise use dynamic IPs to avoid being blocked. GoDaddy also is unable or unwilling to relclassify my Dedicated IP with SORBS DUHL. I'm in the process of moving hosts .

 

[Jimmy19]

BTW, looking at those settings again, I think what tripped me up was the "Enable variable bounced email address values" which is what puts a + sign and the user's email address (encoded) after the bounced email address, which is what violates Google's bulk sender recommendations. I suppose I could have just gone to using a static "bounced email address" and automated bounced email handling and probably everything would be alright. It's the variable return address which is bad.

Thats interesting. I had that enabled as well when I was getting errors. I should try that too and see if it works.

 

[rfc0001]

How long do you set the watched content/email alerts for? I just did 45 days.

View attachment 183562

I use 6 months to avoid spamming users who are no longer active. Probably could be a lot shorter.