bounced emails

[hornstar6969]

If a member has subscribed to something in photopost, and then they are banned I noticed they are still getting subscribed emails even tho they are banned. This gets worse when their email becomes invalid and they are still getting emails, but they are bouncing....which is now making yahoo annoyed at me.

I need to ensure people in the banned usergroup and awaiting email confirmation usergroup never get any email what so ever.

What should I do?

[Chuck S]

well there are no email subscriptions usergroup permissions. You would need to view that members photopost profile and remove there photo and category subscriptions or add some type of code modification that deletes notifications when you ban someone.

[hornstar6969]

Don't you think this is an important aspect that should be dealt with globally by your team? Since getting blacklisted by yahoo etc. is never a good thing.

[Chuck S]

Well it is just not a feature in the software is what I am saying. It could be a nice suggestion for the suggestions forum for the relative product or products for some future consideration sure.

I am merely answering your support inquiry as related to the actual software features. An Admin or a that user can view all notifications and unsubscribe as necessary by viewing that use's photopost profile.

[Michael P]

It's possible, if you have an email account setup for bounces and then PRO has access to process that account; but its not something we support at this time.

[Alfa1]

I dont see how the above suggestion (to manually deactivate accounts) can be applied to big boards. Hornstar has 600.000 members.

I think its best to completely turn off Photopost email functions, because using them is against a wide array of anti-spam laws. Yahoo is right on this matter.

[Chuck S]

Alfa just curious about your comment. How is sending someone an email that has elected to be notified of new photos or comments against anti-spam laws. if you choose to actually get sent content from a site it is not spam. Any court in the land would uphold that as well.

[Alfa1]

Unfortunately that is not the case. If you want to send out bulk email, then you have to conform to the requirements set out by the various anti-spam laws. I've touched on this matter in my article here:
How to keep your board from getting blacklisted as a spammer

And also here:

Originally Posted by Alfa1

Bounced email
Bounced mail is a severe problem. Webmasters have the choice between managing bounced mail or getting banned by large email providers. Out of the box, vbulletin functionality will get larger sites banned and there is nothing in vbulletin to prevent this. I've written extensively about this here:
How to keep your board from getting blacklisted as a spammer

What this means for any webmaster that wants to avoid getting banned by email providers, is to invest a bizarre amount of time and energy into reviewing bounced email and processing them one by one. For larger sites this can mean reviewing tens of thousands of emails. Once thats done, it becomes much less. But still an ongoing and stupefying task.

This can be resolved by complying with the US law according to the Anti-spam act, Can-Spam act, related laws, EU anti spam directives , international law and by complying to the demands of large email providers.

Practically this means:

1. Automatically handling bounced emails
2. Tweaking the content of all outgoing email to comply
3. Add a link to administrative email to automatically unsubscribe / opt out from all email lists & subscriptions

Administrators A breakdown of lacking administr/mod tools and why this can force admins to give up..

I hope this information is useful to you.

[Chuck S]

Alfa it is a nice article indeed but alot of it is company specific policies whereas I was referring to the actual court laws.

The one main issue here that really whether an email is valid and thats an issue with alot of software it requires user interaction to make sure they provide accurate info. One could setup as bounced email filter as Michael states.

Maybe a nice idea for a suggestion since Pro 8 will be going into beta soon

I would suggest you outline exactly what type of features you wish for inclusion there.

[Alfa1]

The actual law can be found here: Anti-spam act, Can-Spam act, EU anti spam directives , international law

I'd like to request the following features for PP8:
- Automatically remove subscriptions if members are in the usergroups: 'Banned members' or in 'awaiting email confirmation'.
- With all outgoing email, add an unsubscribe link
- With all outgoing email add the reason for the email and the contact details of the sender.

For me the above would suffice, as I am pretty far with a script that reads bounced email from an inbox, evaluates the bounce rules and then moves users to 'awaiting email confirmation' and removes all vbulletin subscriptions. I will be sharing the script as a vb addon.

But I think others would be helped if PP would include a function that would do something similar.

[Chuck S]

all subscription emails have a remove subscription link.

any notification emails also to my knowledge have the correct subject and clear wording on what it is and the contact info should be your admin email.

what we do not have is any automatic removing of subscriptions if someone is in a banned group. Lots of thought would need to be put into that one as there is no default banned group and that can vary with install.

Now my thought on that one is rather simple add a new usergroup permission called is ban group. then simply only send email when is ban group is no. That would I think solve that issue. Of course PhotoPost Pro would need to have a global email function like I use in Classifieds and Reviewpost.

[Mart Grazer]

Originally Posted by hornstar6969

Don't you think this is an important aspect that should be dealt with globally by your team? Since getting blacklisted by yahoo etc. is never a good thing.

I too suppose for this as it's an important.


Mart grazer

[Chuck S]

I can possibly add functionality to specify a usergroup send email permissions thats relatively easy but that still means the admin has to set the permissions.

[Alfa1]

Yes, that would be very helpful. Because then we could set the permission for 'awaiting email confirmation' usergroup to 'No' and that would block any further email from being send out to members with bouncing email accounts.

Thanks!

[Chuck S]

Yes thats relatively easy to ad.