Why are most of your emails bouncing?
It’s time for an update to the Mail Server solution. As you know from previous posts, I’ve been running my own mail server for many years (since 2003). The latest issue came up when my emails were bouncing at an extremely high rate. This is not normal, as I would expect to bounce only about 2%-5% of my emails being sent. I use single opt-in, and sometimes people just enter bad email addresses, so this is really not too bad of a bounce rate.
But, a month or so ago: late November 2009, and December 2009, my entire list started to disappear rather quickly, I was bouncing about 20% – 25% of my list on every send! Wow, I thought maybe there was a problem with a black listing, but that does not seem to be the case. At least not for the bouncing problem.
My first inclination was to move hosts, and I did do that quite quickly, moving to another hosting company on another VPS Mail Server. But, I had a problem with that host in that they could not get my send rate up high enough (5,000/hour) for me to even consider them. Even after several tickets and forum posts, I could not find a solution, unfortunately this host even runs on nearly the same hardware/software platform as my previous host, so, I’ll just cross this new host off of my referral list for large list mail server hosting at this point.
Back to my Old Host
A quick look around in WHM (Web Host Manager for unix/linux systems) and I quickly found the problem. There is a Mail section of the ‘Tweak Settings’ menu option and someone at my old host had limited my email sending to 2,000/hour! Anything over that amount was showing up as ‘bounced email’ to my Mailing List Software (List Mail Pro – yes that is my affiliate link). This is quite a disaster, but not one that required too much work to fix. I quickly restored all of the bounces from December (manually using MySQL) and reset them all to a clean slate (zero bounces), and then I added some code into the bounce handler of ListMailPro (my affiliate link) so that it would never again consider those return emails as bounced messages.
Returned to Normal…
What a relief, I’m not back to my normal list size, and all is running smoothly again on my old host. I will be posting an ‘Update’ to my Mailing List software recommendations, and also posting my newest findings (my click-throughs are actually higher on my own mail server than on some of the professional services) in the next week. If you would like to have your own Mail Server setup and running (for low cost) contact me through BGS Web Design – my web design company and let me know.
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