8 ms·

I must be missing something here. If the email account is dead, sender (Mozilla in this case) will get an error reply such as "550 No such account", etc. When

I must be missing something here. If the email account is dead, sender (Mozilla in this case) will get an error reply such as "550 No such account", etc. When that happens, obviously, Mozilla should stop sending to that account.

kentonv 9y ago
The stated problem is with accounts that are inactive but still open. A gmail account that hasn't been touched in 10 years, for example.
- carterehsmith 9y ago
  Will that produce a bounce (and so.. graylisting/blacklisting)? I think not, but I may be wrong. BTW the OP said "dead", not "inactive but still open"
  - kentonv 9y ago
    No bounce. My reading of the article is that the problem is with accounts that are still valid, but inactive. If you send a lot of mail to such accounts, e-mail providers flag you as spammy, apparently.
    - pmlnr 9y ago
      So instead of making a fuss about broken anti-spam measures that are breaking email, mozilla gives in to tracking?
      - jasonlotito 9y ago
        No. They proposed one way of handling it. People didn't like the proposal. They've come up with another way.
    - dsr_ 9y ago
      ...which is remarkable because the email providers are the ones who are keeping the accounts open. All they need to do is internally maintain a list of dormant accounts (as defined by not connecting to read email in some period of time); send a series of warnings to those accounts; stop accepting email for those accounts; at some point, delete the accounts and let mail bounce. Document the policy and the timeline. What am I leaving out? Oh, forwarding accounts. Let the user mark them as forwarding accounts and change the "dead" heuristic to spot when all mail sent by the account's rules is bouncing. I suppose that might cut the statistical boasting a bit (12 billion active users!) but at this point nobody has any sympathy for marketing departments anyway.
      - jacobr1 9y ago
        Email providers track "engagement", not just overall account activity. Plenty of "marketing" messages are sent to still active account and just go undread. Enough of this will cause messages to be routed to the bulk/spam folder.
      - Spooky23 9y ago
        That’s just one use case. There’s a category of bulk mail that isn’t spam, but isn’t read. The providers punish those mailers who overload on those unread messages.
    - lazyjones 9y ago
      I doubt this explanation. I have personally seen spamhaus blacklist a newsletter that was subscribed to using double opt-in. What happened: the e-mails never bounced, the provider just closed down and - what a "coincidence" - the domain ended up being owned by someone who immediately used it as a "spam honeypot" for spamhaus. It's apparently impossible to protect a sender against this by other means than detecting real user interaction. Alternatively, blacklist providers doing this could be ignored...
- AckSyn 9y ago
  My response to that is "tough nuggets" or auto-unsubscribe if the user doesn't perform an action to keep it active.
- emidln 9y ago
  The way most people solve this is with a unique code attached to some tracking pixel that gets picked up when the HTML email is opened. We use an alternate of embedding the unique code in the links for the email so that even a text only email will trigger a click for that user if they copy/paste the link. You lose "open" tracking, but this isn't too bad unless you are selling ad impressions for your emails.
  - hossbeast 9y ago
    What about your subscribers which use text only email?
    - emidln 9y ago
      The links in the text email look like: https://www.example.com/foo/bar?blah_id=123456&utm... If you don't copy/paste a link from any email within a year you end up falling off the "active users" segment and we stop wasting our time sending you emails. For text-only users (which we seem to have a few who have "clicks" but no "opens"). The particular system I work with is actually slightly more sophisticated and considers usage from a lot of channels (push message consumption, email opens and clicks, app usage, alexa usage, bot interactions, and website usage). If you don't do any of those things you fall into less and less frequent push/email interactions until we stop bothering with routine newsletter/updates messages except for an occasional "please come back"-style campaign.
      - binaryapparatus 9y ago
        I don't understand how copy/paste can trigger the tracking on your side. Can you please explain? I am using mutt to read emails and vim to write them, I'd be very surprised if copy/paste has any effect for you.
        tpxl 9y ago
        The URL holds an unique id for each mail sent, such as the `blah_id=123456` example in the parent comment.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
ryan-c 9y ago
Supposedly, some ISPs recycle dead accounts as spam traps. http://docs.briteverify.com/spamtraps/ http://docs.briteverify.com/spamtraps/ Now, keep in mind the source of that information sells mailing list cleaning solutions, and it may be "email marketer" superstition, I don't know.
rixed 9y ago
Big SMTP won't tell because they don't want a client to scan for valid accounts.

kentonv 9y ago

The stated problem is with accounts that are inactive but still open. A gmail account that hasn't been touched in 10 years, for example.

carterehsmith 9y ago
Will that produce a bounce (and so.. graylisting/blacklisting)? I think not, but I may be wrong. BTW the OP said "dead", not "inactive but still open"
- kentonv 9y ago
  No bounce. My reading of the article is that the problem is with accounts that are still valid, but inactive. If you send a lot of mail to such accounts, e-mail providers flag you as spammy, apparently.
  - pmlnr 9y ago
    So instead of making a fuss about broken anti-spam measures that are breaking email, mozilla gives in to tracking?
    - jasonlotito 9y ago
      No. They proposed one way of handling it. People didn't like the proposal. They've come up with another way.
  - dsr_ 9y ago
    ...which is remarkable because the email providers are the ones who are keeping the accounts open. All they need to do is internally maintain a list of dormant accounts (as defined by not connecting to read email in some period of time); send a series of warnings to those accounts; stop accepting email for those accounts; at some point, delete the accounts and let mail bounce. Document the policy and the timeline. What am I leaving out? Oh, forwarding accounts. Let the user mark them as forwarding accounts and change the "dead" heuristic to spot when all mail sent by the account's rules is bouncing. I suppose that might cut the statistical boasting a bit (12 billion active users!) but at this point nobody has any sympathy for marketing departments anyway.
    - jacobr1 9y ago
      Email providers track "engagement", not just overall account activity. Plenty of "marketing" messages are sent to still active account and just go undread. Enough of this will cause messages to be routed to the bulk/spam folder.
    - Spooky23 9y ago
      That’s just one use case. There’s a category of bulk mail that isn’t spam, but isn’t read. The providers punish those mailers who overload on those unread messages.
  - lazyjones 9y ago
    I doubt this explanation. I have personally seen spamhaus blacklist a newsletter that was subscribed to using double opt-in. What happened: the e-mails never bounced, the provider just closed down and - what a "coincidence" - the domain ended up being owned by someone who immediately used it as a "spam honeypot" for spamhaus. It's apparently impossible to protect a sender against this by other means than detecting real user interaction. Alternatively, blacklist providers doing this could be ignored...
AckSyn 9y ago
My response to that is "tough nuggets" or auto-unsubscribe if the user doesn't perform an action to keep it active.
emidln 9y ago
The way most people solve this is with a unique code attached to some tracking pixel that gets picked up when the HTML email is opened. We use an alternate of embedding the unique code in the links for the email so that even a text only email will trigger a click for that user if they copy/paste the link. You lose "open" tracking, but this isn't too bad unless you are selling ad impressions for your emails.
- hossbeast 9y ago
  What about your subscribers which use text only email?
  - emidln 9y ago
    The links in the text email look like: https://www.example.com/foo/bar?blah_id=123456&utm... If you don't copy/paste a link from any email within a year you end up falling off the "active users" segment and we stop wasting our time sending you emails. For text-only users (which we seem to have a few who have "clicks" but no "opens"). The particular system I work with is actually slightly more sophisticated and considers usage from a lot of channels (push message consumption, email opens and clicks, app usage, alexa usage, bot interactions, and website usage). If you don't do any of those things you fall into less and less frequent push/email interactions until we stop bothering with routine newsletter/updates messages except for an occasional "please come back"-style campaign.
    - binaryapparatus 9y ago
      I don't understand how copy/paste can trigger the tracking on your side. Can you please explain? I am using mutt to read emails and vim to write them, I'd be very surprised if copy/paste has any effect for you.
      - tpxl 9y ago
        The URL holds an unique id for each mail sent, such as the `blah_id=123456` example in the parent comment.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

ryan-c 9y ago

Supposedly, some ISPs recycle dead accounts as spam traps. http://docs.briteverify.com/spamtraps/ http://docs.briteverify.com/spamtraps/ Now, keep in mind the source of that information sells mailing list cleaning solutions, and it may be "email marketer" superstition, I don't know.

rixed 9y ago

Big SMTP won't tell because they don't want a client to scan for valid accounts.