November 2002

Email Technique
Bounce Management

Many list management companies provide you with an option that allows you to choose how many times they will try to deliver to an email addresses if the email you are sending bounces.

When I first started sending an ezine I set my option to three attempts to deliver before the address would be automatically removed. You generally don't want to remove someone from your list after only one failed attempt to deliver them email. There could be any number of reasons why a particular good email doesn't get delivered. The server may be down or there could have been a brief glitch in the Internet connection. Also, the recipient may be on vacation and incoming emails exceeded the capacity of their inbox. You wouldn't want to delete the good address because of a temporary condition.

About a year ago the free email accounts at Hotmail and Yahoo were experiencing a greater amount of difficulty than usual. My list management company alerted me to expect a high number of bounced emails from those companies and suggested that I raise the number of bounces allowed before they automatically removed the address from my list. This worked for a while until . . . .

 . . . places like Hotmail and Yahoo started calling you a spammer if you sent too many emails to their systems that bounced. So now I've come full circle and have my settings back to three bounces before automatic deletion.

LOW VOLUME
If you have the time and I don't see how you could with a high volume list like mine, you could go over the bounced emails to see if there is some obvious reason they bounced. Someone could have accidentally submitted an address and put .cam instead of .com or something simple like that. If you can save a few subscribers by noticing things like that and fixing them, that's great. It's just pretty tedious and probably not worth your time.

Upcoming topics for this section:

• HTML email

• Getting subscribers fast

• How to make money with your zine

• How to gain clout with your zine

• How to maximize the signups on your website

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