I run a dating site and trying to figure out how to manage bounced emails where were sent to site members. I am sure other webmasters have encountered the same issue and would like to get their feedback in resolving this issue. I am interested in industry's best practice, so we resolve this issue once for all. Currently the site sends email notifications to members when other members are trying to contact them, when someone replied to their forum post etc. Some of these bounce due to the fact that - they have changed their ISP - their mailbox is full - they have set an auto responder, or - their web based email service has been discontinued due to inactivity Currently we are manually switching off email notifications in user account settings when emails sent to them started to bounce. But this is a time intensive task and adds no value. So what's the best way to resolve this issue? Many thanks for taking the time to read and respond to my post.
You can't do nothing if your members are providing you with fake emails or change of addresses, although there is a service that can update you of such changes if they are subscribed. You can encourage them to join such service or add into their control panel a reminder to keep their contact email up to date, best way is by creating an event that appears every "X" days reminding this fact, but you need to be knowledgeable or ask someone else to implement this feature.
Thanks. Your suggestion will still rely on users to keep updating their email address and we all know that only a small proporton of the users will act on this. I would like us to be more in control. What if we tracked bounced emails and then run a daily cron job to identify those users and then switch-off email notifications in their preferences? Is this something other webmasters are doing? I would like to hear from other webmasters who may have faced this issue in the past and have since then successfully resolved it. Does anyone know how phpBB and vBulletin handles this issue?