Well, I sent out the first batch of 200 emails, and guess how many bounced! 26! That actually didn’t come as much of a surprise. These are people who registered on WikiStudent at the beginning of 2007, and email addresses do change. It also wouldn’t surprise me if I got something like a 10% bounce rate overall.
I still remember the very first PHP mail script I ran, in 2006. It was actually thrilling to see bounced messages arrive in my inbox - it was proof that the script was working: that mails were in fact being sent. Exciting stuff!
These days bounced emails are just a drag. Now I have to make sure I don’t send mails to those bounced addresses again, and it is not as simple as that… Some of them are ‘hard bounces’, i.e. permanent failures, while others are ’soft bounces’ where the email might work on another day (like when there is space in the mailbox, or when the connection doesn’t time out), so I have to read the reason in each bounced message to determine what to do.
Some examples of ‘hard bounce’ messages I got:
* Recipient address rejected: User unknown
* Remote host said: 550 No such user
* Remote host said: 550 5.1.0 Address rejected
* Remote host said: 550 5.1.1 Account expired
So ja, I now also have invalid email addresses to deal with (and for another five weeks, since that’s about how long it will take till all the members get the email). More admin, *sigh* but I knew this was coming!