Track bounced back newsletter emails

Question

Hi,

I've built a newsletter system which tracks:

• Openings
• Link clicks
• Unsubscriptions

However, I need to find a way of tracking which newsletter emails 'bounced back'.

Has anyone done this before and whats the best way of doing it?

Thanks, Curt

Answer 1

When sending the mail via SMTP you supply the FROM command which is sometimes referred to as the 'Sender' or 'Envelope Sender'. This is separate from the From: header in the email itself. What you want to do is to create a 'bounced' mailbox and set that as the 'Sender' for the email. If there is a bounce, then most mail servers will send a (NDR) notification back to this sender.

Then you need to periodically check this mailbox for NDR's and parse them for the original recipient and if it was a hard or soft bounce. There are various libraries that can do this for you such as ListNanny