Hello,
Each time we send out our members group emails, we get bouncebacks from some older emails.

Is there a way we can "clean" up our membership database for any emails that do bounce back?

Currently, some of these clog up our email system.

Hi, Dance:

It's safe to assume that the majority of the bouncebacks are from members who have dropped away from the community. You can clean up your member database and get rid of members who haven't visited in quite some time, and that will probably take care of a lot of your bouncebacks. Here's how:

In your control panel, choose Members>>Member Management
Under Search Members, click the link for Advanced Search Parameters.
Scroll down to the fields for Last Login, and choose the appropriate dates (perhaps the start of your community for the first date, and, for instance, a year or 6 months ago for the second date), scroll down and hit the Search button. This will return results of members who have not logged in since the last date you chose (a year or six months ago).
Click in the Select box for each member you'd like to delete (or Select All at the bottom of the list).
Under the dropdown list of Desired Actions, choose Delete Members Completely.

Dance Addict,

We have the same problem. Here are the two ways I do maintenance to make sure our membership list is current.

Once a month I go in and search for last login for the prior year and if they 1) haven't logged in for the last 12 months and 2) haven't opted to receive emails, I delete them. I figure they are not active anymore.

When we send out the monthly email newsletter, we invariably get bouncebacks. If they are soft bounces, we let them go. If they are hard bounces ("mailbox no longer exists") we go in and check their membership profile. If they haven't logged in within the last 12 months, we delete them completely. If they've been active, then we simply go in and uncheck the "wants to receive emails" in the preference box and PM the member that his email address is invalid and he needs to update it to receive future emails from us.

Hope that helps. It's not my favorite part of running the community, but our sponsors and advertisers want to have a current count of our members and our opt-ins, and this is a fair way of trying to do it.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Mollywog,

Oh, and just for numbers: we sent out our monthly newsletter today to 3975 members and got 48 bounce backs. Now we have to go in and figure out which are soft bounces and which are hard bounces, and clean them up accordingly.

Thank you very much for the tips! Will definitely try that.

Also, if there were some way that Groupee could consider implementing a more automated system, that would be really helpful. For example, we have been trying out a member/email management system and one way was to set a "bounces@XDFDD.CFXC" ... and then if any emails come into this account, then the system generates a list. Perhaps something like this could work for those of us hosting ... that we were able to set up "bounces" and these bounced emails come back and we can then generate this list.

Then we can do a "select" checkbox to put them into an "inactive" list ... or "delete" (all or those selected).

At least this would automate the process.

Please look into something like this as it really is so manual to do something like this, even though that seems to be the only option available. It's just a time waster to have to do this manually with larger member lists.

The other thing want to mention is that many members also prefer to be anonymous or log in from home vs office (or vice versa) ... or just drop in from time to time without logging in.

So, just wouldn't want to start deleting from last logged in.

Hi there,
Coincidentally, got an email message today about Google apps.

It looks like we can set up an email subscriber solution, but it's kind of techie stuff here ... can you please take a look and advise ... is this something we do in the control panel?

Has anyone used this yet?

https://www.google.com/a/


----------------------------
Changing Mail Exchange (MX) records
Mail Exchange (MX) records control how incoming email is routed for your domain. Before Google can host your email, you'll need to change these MX records to point to our servers.



If your domain already has email addresses, please be careful changing MX records. To avoid disruption in email service, be sure to create the same set of user accounts with the control panel before changing your MX records Learn more.

If you're not ready to change your MX records yet, you can start sending outgoing mail right away by verifying domain ownership. However, incoming mail will not be delivered to Google until your MX records are changed.
1. Sign in to your domain hosting company's website using the username and password associated with your domain.
2. Navigate to an MX record maintenance page. MX records are special DNS (Domain Name Service) records, and are often located under sections titled "DNS Management," "Mail Server Configuration," or "Name Server Management." You may need to turn on advanced settings to allow editing of these MX records.
3. Delete any existing MX records before entering new MX records.
4. For each MX record, enter information according to the entries in the following table.
You may not be allowed to enter the priority values exactly as they appear in the table below; in that case, simply ensure that the server addresses are prioritized in the same order as they appear in the table. (i.e. The priority ranking [1, 3, 3, 5, 5, 5, 5] should work just as well as [1, 5, 5, 10, 10, 10, 10] so long as you keep the addresses in the right order.)

If you're asked to specify the type of each record you're adding, enter "MX".

MX records often require the specific format of DNS records, including a trailing dot (".") at the end of any full-qualified domain names (e.g. "server.example.com.")

Set any TTL values to the maximum allowed.

MX Server address Priority
#####.GOOGLE.COM. #
####.GOOGLE.COM. #
#####..GOOGLE.COM. #
#####..GOOGLEMAIL.COM. #
#####..GOOGLEMAIL.COM. #
#####..GOOGLEMAIL.COM. #
#####.GOOGLEMAIL.COM. #

Dance:

Changing your MX records to Google just changes the mail server that handles your email. It doesn't automate the process at all, it just sends your bounces (and all your mail) to a different mail server. It removes our webhosting mail servers from the equation completely.

If you choose to go this route, you'll need to submit a support ticket to change the MX records, since this is something we'd have to do for you.

Hi Lori,
Thanks very much for the feedback ... will definitely "hold off" as don't want to mess anything up. Will try maybe with another domain name and see what advantages/disadvantages, etc.

Best regards!

Dance Addict,

You are right about the "not logging in part" since your site doesn't require log in. I forgot about that. Our site is set up to require log in to view anything on our forums.

I agree that manually managing bouncebacks is a real disadvantage of using the Groupee mass email function and having that feature upgraded would be a real plus.

We are moving to another email server to deliver our newsletters for this reason, plus we want to offer unregistered members the option of receiving our newsletter. The groupee system isn't set up to allow unregistered members to sign up for our newsletters. (We're sticking with Groupee for everything else, though!)

The system we are moving the email newsletters to will have bounceback functionality and automatic unsubscribes and subscribe functionality.