I used to send the newsletter through Simple Email Service (SES) on Amazon’s cloud thing, AWS.
I found SES when I looked for alternatives to services like Constant Contact and MailChimp.
We have thousands of subscribers, so whether a service charges by subscriber or per message, I found the costs like 10x more than we collect per month in donations… so no. I’m not exaggerating much.
If you’re leasing a server instance on Amazon Web Services, they’ll send like 60,000 messages per month for free per server, and they don’t mess with subscribers — so no charge there.
I moved away from AWS when I had trouble paying a bill last year. I’ve refused to switch back because I don’t like being dependent on any one provider. I decided to parse the bounces myself.
That was last year.
I’m finally writing the software to automate the processing of newsletter email failures.
Hard bounces are Permanent failures are like:
- Email address no longer valid
- User clicked Spam or Junk button
Soft bounces are Transient failures like:
- Vacation or Out of Office notices
- Delivery attempt continue (trying again)
I’m using PHP Mailparse
Mailparse is an extension for parsing and working with email messages. It can deal with » RFC 822 and » RFC 2045 (MIME) compliant messages.
https://www.php.net/manual/en/book.mailparse.php
More later.
🖖
It’s later! It’s tomorrow. Still working on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SMTP_server_return_codes
