I know this issue has been raised but I would like to raise it again.

Every six months or so I mail out a mass email to let my forum members know about new features and so on. I get a fair number of bounce-backs from people who changed email addresses.

I send to all members except banned ones. I don't want to have to ban or delete members whose email address is non-functional; that seems rather harsh. Some of these people are still active and posting.

I would like to be able to flag their account as "invalid email address" for two reasons. One, so I can skip them when I do my mass email. Two, so when they go into their forum profile it says right there that there is an issue with their email address so they can fix it. Otherwise they'll never know!

An alternative is to have some sort of flag of "get email from admin" that I can turn off - which is less helpful because now they have no idea that it's because their email address was bad. It would be great if there was a feature in the control panel - if this is the route we have to take - that both sets the flag and sends them a PM with a generic note, so that way they see the flashing message box and know what was done and how to fix it.

Finally, it really needs to be handled *somehow*. If you just blast out messages to bad email addresses repeatedly, that is exactly how a company blocks you as a spammer. I have no doubt that after this current blast goes out, that I'm running right now, that at least one or two ISPs will have auto-blocked me as a result and I'll have to go deal with them ...

I agree, we need some method to track down these invalid email addresses - as the forum grows, so does the problem.

Well, you'd have to do this all manually... For very good reasons...

Your forum would HAVE to "read in" email, even then, their mail server would have to return a specific error code which some just do not... So you could end up flagging valid messages back (away messages, challenge messages, deferred messages which state another error, etc).

even then, you'd have to have several ways to read in messages:
1. Email piping (where your server sends the email directly to the forum).
2. POP3/IMAP (where your forum would check for new messages).

#2 is the only real solution however, as some people will not have the knowlege to not bork their email configuration files and some users are on shared hosts which do not have the ability to edit the raw aliases configuration. Some people also host their email on 3rd party servers (like myself).

Haven't looked into how mailing lists scripts handle this - but they do. Albeit usually on a three strike rule.

I raised this too, as i found 9,0000 e-mails in a bounce back.
+ If they subscribe to watch lists and then there e-mail
becomes invalid, where do they go !!

That was a lot of my 9,0000

And the only work around was to go into that persons account
and turn off all there notifications.

Where a master switch admin side (DO NOT E_MAIL )
would help the cause.

IMO

The reality is that unless you have Admin rights on the Server you're not going to be able to automate this.

You would need to have the rights to read all mail logs (a normal non-admin user won't have that right on Windows or Linux hosting)

For those that own or have admin rights then yes it could be scripted to an automated routine. A lot of scripting work, but could be done.

Like I said, #2 is the only viable option

Both are viable, and could run in tandem.

Think of all of the coding that'd have to be done, #1 is redundant and has major problems (you're putting groupee in a position where they're telling people they have to edit config files for one; some systems work differantly for another, users won't be able to do this on shared hosts, etc), whereas #2 anyone can do as it just reads pop3/IMAP

not at all - I run another script that allows the choice between setting up a pipe for incoming emails, and one where the script checks the mailbox and puts the email into the script.

I have set the former up before fairly easily, but the alternative was a 2 second job to get working.