11 thousand bounces????

[agrothe]

Hi, I recently setup the latest version of phplist, imported 13,000 users and send a newsletter. It then processed 11,000 bounces!!!!!

One of my emails was listed as having bounced, but it's an active email and its @mydomain.com, not a hotmail, yahoo or gmail account.

What would cause so many bounces!

[agrothe]

PS: I entered some of the bounced email addresses into an email verifier and they came out verified, so it doesn't seem that the list was grossly outdated either....

[H2B2]

Yes that's way above a normal bounce percentage, even if you would have imported an old user list.

Did you take a closer look at some of the bounced messages. Did you find any specific reason for bouncing that is frequently mentioned?

Are you using usertracking?
Ref: http://mantis.phplist.com/view.php?id=7683

Did you check your DNS? Are you sending at full speed on a shared host? Any ISP imposed message limits?
Ref:
- http://docs.phplist.com/PhpListPreflight
- http://docs.phplist.com/PhpListConfigSendRate

Did you check the bugtracker and bug discussion forum for possible incompatibilities between phplist and your server setup? e.g.: http://forums.phplist.com/viewtopic.php?t=6039

[agrothe]

Did you take a closer look at some of the bounced messages. Did you find any specific reason for bouncing that is frequently mentioned?

yeah, the error: unrouteable mail domain

It shows up a lot, even for domains that I know are good.

[agrothe]

I just found out that the SPF record I asked to have created wasn't done, could this be the cause?

[H2B2]

unrouteable mail domain

In daily practice "unrouteable mail domain" often indicates that you have reached the maximum number of mails you are allowed to send by your hosting provider in a given time frame.
e.g.:
- http://forums.phplist.com/viewtopic.php?p=12786#12786
- http://www.tobiasly.com/2004/11/22/unro ... il-domain/
- http://www.lightningsupport.com/index.p ... id=49&c=12


You may have missed this when reading the docs:

Does your email/site hosting company limit the number of emails per hour you may send? Are you sure? If so, have you set phpList's "sending speed"? If not, check-out Configuring the Send-Speed
Source: http://docs.phplist.com/PhpListPreflight


Many people are running phpList on hosted servers they do not own or manage. These are usually shared boxes: that is, one computer has lots of web sites on it. This means that if one web site attempts to dominate the CPU or otherwise behave in a non-community-minded, limited resource way, everyone suffers.

For this reason most hosting providers will limit the number of emails a single site may send. Either limiting the number of emails per hour or per day. This is their job, to make sure no one user needlessly impacts the other sites on that machine.

Another, perhaps better reason providers will limit your email resources is that they don't want to host spammers. So, what does this mean to you, a non-spammer? You must check with your hosting provider before sending your first mailing. Ask: Is there a daily limit? Is there an hourly limit? Odds are that there is. Then use the following settings in the config.php file to safely live within these limits.
Source: http://docs.phplist.com/PhpListConfigSendRate

[H2B2]

I just found out that the SPF record I asked to have created wasn't done, could this be the cause?

That's not very likely, though not impossible either.