Startup Email: Monitor your bounce messages

If you're running an internet service, you'll probably need to send emails to your users at some point. Getting those emails through to their inbox can be quite a challenge.

You can pay someone to do it (ConstantContact, Boomerang, etc), but their rates are through the roof -- this can be as high as a couple cents per email. The lowest quote we were able to get was about $0.003 per email, with huge volume. Sending out one email to our user base would have cost nearly $2,000.

At that point, you've just got to do it yourself. One of the main things we didn't want to handle was tracking bounce messages. All major services require that you do this: if you send a message to an invalid address twice, you will be heavily penalized.

I hacked up a quick script to login to an IMAP server, check for bounce messages, fetch the dead email, and move the messages out of the inbox. Since I figured it could be useful to more than just me, I've open sourced it.

You can grab a copy of the source here: monitorBounces.php

If anybody else has written any other software to help them get past the near defacto spam classification, please let me know : )