No email list has 100% deliverable addresses. In fact, on the average, 10% of all emails on a list are returned as undeliverable for any one of a number of reasons

• The addressee has moved and has a new email address 
• Typographic errors were made while entering the email address 
• The addressee is on vacation 
• The email box is full.

The question is: What is to be done with returned mail?

Well, if the addressee has moved and has a new email box or if the address contains a typographical error, then one has no choice but to correct the email address or remove it from the list and hope that the addressee will again initiate contact. If the bad addresses belong to extremely valuable customers or prospects, one might go so far as to call and get the correct address. On the other hand, addressees who are on vacation or whose email boxes are just temporarily full probably want to be kept on the list.

What all this says is that it would be very handy to have an application that actually processes returned mail to find out why it was rejected and to sort the returns into bins for proper handling. The iMakeNews Bounce Manager does just that.

How it works

When an email address is bad, the POP server sends a message back to the SMTP server saying that the mail is undeliverable and why. The problem is, there are literally hundreds of different POP servers in use, and each has its own unique way of expressing the reasons for the return.

The Bounce Manager matches the return message with an ever-growing catalog of return messages, correctly interprets it, and sorts the return message into one of four categories:

• Bad Email Address 
• Vacation 
• Mailbox Full 
• Unknown

At that point, Bounce Manager offers the user the choice of leaving the email list unchanged, summarily removing messages in particular categories and/or reviewing and correcting bounced email addresses individually. As a practical matter, if the numbers of returns are in the thousands, one might want to remove the Bad Email addresses, keep the Vacation and Mailbox Full addresses, and view the Unknown messages to see if any are salvageable. On the other hand, smaller numbers of returns from an extremely valuabe email list might call for more analysis. A count is also maintained of how many times a particular email address has bounced. So you might determine that any email address reporting "Mailbox Full" more than 3 times is probably abandoned and have these email addresses automatically removed from your list.

The functional granularity of the Bounce Manager is substantially higher than any newsletter emailing application on the market, and that's just what our customers, people who rely on newsletter marketing, have come to expect of us.