Temporarily do not send email to soft bounces. Protect sender reputation.

[Alpha1]

Email bounces can be Temporary / Transient or Permanent. With Temporary bounces no direct action is taken, until a certain number of bounces is reached. In most cases its a matter of inbox_full, which is resolved after the user clears their inbox. Often this takes weeks to a month to clear up.

This means that we keep sending email to email addresses that are not available. This decreases sender reputation. The lower sender reputation is, the less of your total emails will arrive. Sender reputation is very important and in some cases low reputation can cause sender account to be frozen or the sender to be blacklisted as a spammer by specific email domains. In such case your email to for example gmail or hotmail will stop arriving as it gets blocked.

I suggest the following improvement:
For accounts that have a soft bounce, change the user state to a new state:

User state: Email Invalid (temporary bounce)
After X number of days (30 by default), the user state is reversed to what it was before.

Accounts with this state will be treated the same way as accounts with the state:
User state: Email invalid (bounced)

This way, we do not send email to temporary inactive email addresses and only try again after a set number of days.

 

[StarArmy]

100%. Email is more uptight than it's ever been, so we should be trying to mitigate issues as much as possible.

 

[Kirby]

I kinda disagree on this suggestion, at least in it's current form.

While it is true that continously sending emails to dead recipients may negatively affect sender reputation you have to balance this risk vs. the if legitimate users not receiving emails due to an odd soft bounce.

IMHO the latter is much more likely than the first and thus XF approach to require multiple soft bounces to fully stop sending emails seems fine to me.

Some kind of backoff algorithm might be an option though, so the pause is not immediately 30 days but smth. like
10 Minutes
1 Hour
1 Day
7 Days