Feedback: Deleting Bouncing Emails



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Feedback: Deleting Bouncing Emails
By Janet Roberts

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Continuing the discussion about dealing with invalid email addresses, several readers sent in methods for removing them in MS Access and MS Outlook.

Mark Annett of Scruplestore uses this method with Outlook 2000:

"The individual would first have to set up a separate folder called 'dead_addresses' or whatever they wanted. All of the messages would then need to be moved to this folder. Once this happens the person is ready to export.

"Go to 'File' and then select 'import/export.' After the wizard opens, select 'export to a file.' You can then select the type of file that you want (Tab Separated, Comma Separated, Excel, Access etc.).

"After choosing the file type wanted, then they need to select the 'dead_addresses' folder. The final thing that needs to be done is to select 'map custom fields.' This is important, because otherwise it will dump every single field from every email. Hit 'clear map' and then drag the field that you want (From, To, Subject, Message, etc.) onto the map side. This will produce a file, in the format selected, that contains only the particular field information mapped from every email in the 'dead_addresses' folder.

"Assuming the person exports to an Excel document, I used the following equation to extract just the email address from the body field:

=MID(B2,FIND("<",B2)+1,(FIND(">",B2)-FIND("<",B2)-1))

"I exported only the body of the message and then inserted a column so that all the bodies were in column 'B.'

"This works like a charm because the email address in my messages are separated by < and >. It simply pulls out the first text it finds between theses two characters.

"The task should be able to be completed in no more than 5 minutes tops."

Ken Morley said, "I had the same problem removing bounced addresses manually from an MS-Access database. Then I found Microsoft's Access/Outlook - Exchange Wizard, which allows you to easily import a bounced mail folder into MS Access for automatic parsing and removal.

"I wrote a simple VB routine to strip the email addresses and save them in a table then a query to flag them as bounced in my database."

Laura E. Noble, who manages the Resource Center for the Healthcare Financial Management Association follows the common advice not to drop an email address unless it's absolutely necessary because newsletter subscription is a paid-member benefit.

"Part of our solution is to pull a current distribution list directly from our membership database for each issue, so that we only have one database to keep current (many members are on more than one HFMA email distribution list).

"When we changed vendors a little over a year ago, most of the sales reps said we were out of our minds to manage a list that way, and only the BIG bucks firms offered a means to let us pull our distribution lists from our own membership dbase. Lyris provided a fairly convenient way to load our own lists and was the only software we found that came close to providing useable bounce-back data.

"By the way, our weekly, members-only publication, which is roughly 27,500 addresses, averages a 1-percent bounce rate. I've never seen any type of industry average to benchmark against -- have you?"

I have seen numbers that range from 1 percent to more than 20 percent. A lot of it depends on how often you mail out - a daily or weekly newsletter should get fewer bounces than a monthly, because the time lapse allows more email addresses to go bad - and where the names come from. A list drawn from a confirmed opt-in membership base ought to have fewer bounces than one from a general email blast (another reason to be wary of email services that promise to build your subscription list fast). Three percent to 5 percent seems to be in the ballpark.

Now, one final comment on a previous suggestion to avoid trouble by removing any email addresses with "spam" in them, from Dennis Gaskill, better known as Boogie Jack.

"I have 2-3 times as many subscribers with "boogiejack" or a variation of my domain name in the address as I do spam. There's only one reason for that, they are monitoring that address to see if I sell it to spammers or send spam myself.

"I don't remove those addresses either. Since I don't send spam or make subscriber addresses available, there is no reason to be paranoid about it. If the addresses are abused, I'll know it's the list host making them available. Of course, that wouldn't help my reputation, but at least I'd know who is responsible and could explain it, and tell the world on the list host.

"Bottom line for me is, if you don't spam or make your list available to others, you don't have to worry about being monitored for spam. If the spam monitors find value in your ezine, they may well become a customer. Now why would you want to unsubscribe a potential customer?"

Here's the original column on the subject.

Ezine-Tips for June 03, 2002

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Feedback: Deleting Bouncing EmailsBy Janet Roberts

Feedback: Deleting Bouncing Emails
By Janet Roberts