Delivery Failure Options


When sending an email to an invalid/outdated address you will invariably receive an "Undeliverable Message" report detailing the failure.  MailList King can automatically process the messages to determine which addresses in your mailing list are no longer valid.
 

Automatically process Delivery Failure messages

MailList King will check in your mailing list message folder for Delivery Failure messages and each time a message to a particular recipient is returned, their Bounce Count will be increased.  For Soft Bounces (temporary failures) the bounce count is increased by one.  For Hard Bounces (permanent failures) the bounce count is increased by three.  You can view a members bounce count in the "Edit Member" window.

Specify what to search for in the subject line to determine the message is a bounce

 

Soft vs Hard Bounces

Undeliverable message reports are usually categorized as either "Soft" or "Hard" bounces.

A Soft Bounce occurs if the mail server recognizes the address but can't deliver the message, either because the mailbox is full, the server is down or breaks the connection, or the user has abandoned the mailbox.  Soft bounces are often temporary failures.  You may find that when you send to the address again the message will get through.  Soft bounces usually have an error code in the format 4.x.x.

A Hard Bounce is a message that's permanently undeliverable because the address is invalid or because the recipient's mail server is blocking your server.  Resending a message to this recipient will generally fail.  Usually hard bounces have an error code in the format 5.x.x.  MailList King treats a hard bounce as three soft bounces.  For example, if you have specified that MLK is to remove an address after six bounces, in actuality two hard bounces will remove the address.

 

Other Delivery Failure Options

When a particular e-mail address has bounced more than the specified number of times the address will be automatically removed (and added to the Removed List).  Multiple bounces from the same recipient within a short period are ignored.  Note this setting refers to Soft Bounces (read Soft vs Hard Bounces).

If all messages to a specific address have not bounced in x months then the bounce count should be reset to zero

 

Out-of-Office Messages

When a message is encountered that is an "Out of Office" automatic response it is automatically deleted.

Edit the list of phrases that MailList King searches for in the subject of a message to determine if it is an "Out of Office" message.

 

Note: You can also manually process all the messages in a mail folder as bounces:

 

See Also