Deal intelligently with bouncing email addresses

[pauamma]

Title:
Deal intelligently with bouncing email addresses

Area:
email notifications, email address validation, not spamming users

Summary:
When an email sent to a user is rejected or bounces, do something intelligent instead of just ignoring it.

Description:
Currently, when emails Dreamwidth sends to one of its users start bouncing (being rejected, or undeliverable because that email address no longer exists), the Dreamwidth email servers just ignore this, instead of using it as a hint not to deliver more emails to that email address. This behavior was inherited from LiveJournal, and has caused in the past much distress to users, ops people, support volunteers, and email providers, and occasionally drastic reactions by email providers, such as refusing or silently discarding all emails from LiveJournal, thus making the problem worse. LiveJournal recently committed a code change (http://community.livejournal.com/changelog/8801455.html) that changes that, but its approach may no be the best (http://bugs.dwscoalition.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2759). (Specifically, it makes that email address unconfirmed for all user accounts associated with it - http://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=3.)

Other, less drastic ways to deal with delivery problems include notifying the user via their inbox instead of disabling delivery, only acting on the specific account for which the email was sent, only acting if more than a threshold number of emails bounced, or only stopping emails to that address temporarily, instead of until the user takes action. (Or of course, keeping the current approach of ignoring all such reports.)

Poll #3747 Deal intelligently with bouncing email addresses

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 41

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
31 (75.6%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
7 (17.1%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
0 (0.0%)

(I have no opinion)
2 (4.9%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (2.4%)

Comments

[aithine]

I think disabling the email (stop sending emails from Dreamwidth to that email and the user needs to reconfirm that address) and also contacting the person via their inbox to let them know they're having email issues would work. Probably needs a threshold, though--after three bounces or whatever, so that it's not immediate when it's just the person's email server having issues that day. :)