Email Hassle
I’ve finally got round to implementing proper bounce handling. It’s quite important to do if you don’t want to end up treated as a spammer. I’ve implemented a Variable Envelope Return Path (VERP) on all automatically generated mail, added a procmail script to sort out the bounces from other mail and then a Python script to put the bounces into a database. We’ll then mark an address as bouncing if we get three verified bounces.
I also tested our new SPF record and it does seem to be okay.
Having just finished that, I then began to notice that we were getting a lot of complaints from Hotmail/MSN addresses saying that they were not getting mail from us. It turns out that we needed to re-register the server with them, it seems to be the policy that if you have a high volume, unregistered server then they will silently delete all mail that you send.
I really wish that they would reject the mail instead to that senders would get some sort of error message to let them know what’s going on.
FOLLOW UP:
I received a response from Microsoft. The first problem that Yahoo’s spam filter put the message into my junk folder so I didn’t see it immediately. The second problem was that their response was that we should send less mail! I now need to think of something to say to the 15,000 Microsoft users on our site…