Thursday, December 13, 2007

New Bounce Handling Rules

We have enhanced the way JangoMail handles bounces to improve overall system deliverability. Many of the top ISPs like Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, GMail, and others have recently mandated that if an e-mail address bounces even once indicating that the mailbox doesn't exist, email marketers should cease mailing to that e-mail address immediately in order to ensure optimal email deliverability.

In conjunction with this, if a Bounce indicates that the mailbox does not exist, JangoMail will stop sending to this address from your account regardless of what numeric setting you have specified under My Options --> Bounce Handling.

However, if a Bounce indicates a temporary failure for that email address, then the numeric setting under My Options --> Bounce Handling will still apply.

Additionally the new Bounce handling mechanism will allow you to see the Bounce reasons for the life of your account rather than just for 7 days, once the enhanced Reporting module is in place (about six weeks from now).

Here are some examples to illustrate the new Bounce handling:

A bounce with a message like:
smtp;550 4.2.1 mailbox temporarily disabled: akidd4@verizon.net

is a temporary failure, and the setting under My Options --> Bounce Handling would apply.

A bounce with a message like:
smtp;550 No such user here

indicates that the mailbox does not exist at all, so a single bounce would prevent JangoMail from sending to this address in the future.