Suppose you have a subscriber whose ISP seems to think that it's perfectly acceptable to regularly return "550 User Unknown" (or similar) bounces for their active clients. Of course, MailBounce has no means of knowing that the bounces are invalid and the users are still active, so it will happily process the bounces and remove the still-active subscriber(s) from your list.

What to do?

The solution is to instruct MailBounce to "ignore" bounces for those subscribers. You do this via the "Ignored" file.

The Ignored file is merely a collection of addresses that you want MailBounce to exclude from bounce processing under one or more circumstances -- where the "circumstances" are hard bounces, soft bounces, unsubscribes, and redirects. The format of the Ignored file is very flexible and is designed to permit you to create a simple, easily-scanned list of the addresses that are to be ignored by MailBounce.

To use this feature, you must (1) be a Pro user, and (2) have:

a valid Ignored file (see below)
the Ignored filename properly entered in your Preferences file
the use ignored file setting in your Preferences file set to YES

Ignored-address processing supports all four primary bounce categories within MailBounce: HARD and SOFT bounces, address REDIRECTS, and UNSUB requests.

Addresses specified in the Ignored file are case independent.

Ignored File Format

Each line in the Ignored file is formatted as follows:

[keyword(s)] <address> [comment]

where:

keywords denote under what circumstances an address will not be processed
keywords must appear to the left of the address
anything to the right of the address is a comment
keywords are any one or more of: HARD, SOFT, UNSUB, REDIRECT
only the first three characters of any keyword are required
keywords are not case sensitive
if no keywords are present, then "HARD and SOFT" will be assumed (default condition)
spacing is irrelevant, as are blank lines and extra spaces/characters between keywords
addresses must be enclosed in angle brackets:
any line that does not contain angle brackets is treated as a comment line
any line that starts with "#", "!", or ";" is considered to be a comment line
addresses may contain a single asterisk "*" as a wildcard (see below )

So, for example, here are a few lines of a sample ignored file:

        <johndoe@*.mailbounce.biz>          Anything to the right
hard       <marg*@the.thatch.co.uk>   of the address is a comment

Everything appearing on a line that contains no angle brackets
   is considered to be a comment, and is ignored.

soft & redir  <willy@whitehouse.gov> This one will be ignored if it
                                     appears in either a soft bounce or
                                     a redirect

hard,   unsub   <al.gore@whitehouse.gov>  This one will be ignored if it
                                          appears as either a hard bounce
                                          or an unsub

Blank lines are ignored, as are lines that contain no angle brackets.

Placing the keywords to the left of the address allows the file to be nicely formatted, which can make it easier to read. Thus, the sample file shown above could be reformatted to look like this:

              <johndoe@*.mailbounce.biz>  Anything to the right
hard          <marg*@the.thatch.co.uk>    of the address is a comment

soft & redir  <willy@whitehouse.gov>      This one will be ignored if it
                                          appears in either a soft bounce or
                                          a redirect

hard, unsub   <al.gore@whitehouse.gov>    This one will be ignored if it
                                          appears as either a hard bounce
                                          or an unsub

                                          Blank lines are ignored, as are
                                          lines that contain no angle brackets.

Though the second format is much easier to read, MailBounce will process both files the same way.

Note that you are limited only by available memory in the number of addresses you may specify in the Ignored file. However, more entries mean more processing that MailBounce must do when checking for ignored addresses; this can slow MailBounce's processing speed in some cases.

Wildcards

Wildcards may be used in ignored addresses. The only recognized wildcard is an asterisk, and you may use only one per address. When MailBounce encounters a wildcard in an address, it will allow zero or more characters to "match" the wildcard. For example, if you specify <johndoe@*mailbounce.biz>, the following addresses will be matched:

            johndoe@test.mailbounce.biz
            johndoe@webexample.mailbounce.biz
            johndoe@anything.you.can.put.here.mailbounce.biz
            johndoe@anotherdomainthatendsinmailbounce.biz

Take a close look at that last address; it has matched a different domain than the one that was intended in the example. To limit searches to only the exact domain specified, place a period after the asterisk. Thus, <johndoe@*.mailbounce.biz> would match the following addresses:

            johndoe@mailbounce.biz
            johndoe@smtp.mailbounce.biz
            johndoe@anything.you.can.put.here.mailbounce.biz

As another example, specifying <johndoe*@mailbounce.biz> would match the following addresses:

            johndoe@test.mailbounce.biz
            johndoe%local-gateway@mailbounce.biz

Alternatively, <johndoe*mailbounce.biz> would catch all of the addresses shown above.

For more extreme forms of filtering, you can have MailBounce ignore any address that starts with "johndoe" by specifying <johndoe*>. Or ignore any address that has "johndoe" (exactly) as the local-part of the address (i.e., the part to the left of the "@" sign) by specifying <johndoe@*>. Or tell MailBounce to ignore any address in the .MIL domain by specifying <*.mil>; similarly, <*.mailbounce.biz> would instruct MailBounce to ignore all addresses in the mailbounce.biz domain, including all subdomains.

The processing is case independent, so you may use upper, lower or mixed case, according to your own preferences.

Ignored-Address Processing

Remember that MailBounce categorizes all bounces as either HARD, SOFT, REDIRECT, or UNSUB. MailBounce will ignore an address ONLY if its bounce category matches one of the keywords corresponding to that address in the Ignored file. If you do not specify any keywords, MailBounce will categorize the ignored address as "HARD and SOFT" -- i.e., it will automatically ignore all HARD and SOFT bounces from that address.

Note that entering a single keyword overrides the default -- that is, entering the single keyword "HARD" on an Ignored-file address line will cause that address to be ignored only if it HARD bounces.

Ignored-Address Matching

When MailBounce processes the bounce file, any address that is rejected (not processed) because of an Ignored-file match is indicated by a "|" (pipe) symbol in the leading position; thus, the following sample output shows two bounces were rejected because they were present in the Ignored file (one HARD bounce, one SOFT bounce):

       700  |* <CHRIS@OSPREY.COM>
       718  |  <emily@bell.net>

MailBounce also checks the Ignored file each time it makes a fuzzy address match, to ensure that the new address is not in the Ignored list. When it finds a fuzzy match that matches an Ignored address, MailBounce will display a warning message:

  *** jzotta@pipeline.com (Joe Zotta)
  ***   Fuzzy Match Found In Ignored File:
  ***   <jzotta@usa.pipeline.com> (ignored)

This will serve to remind you that the address is still bouncing, and is being ignored. Note that MailBounce will ignore fuzzy matches only if the address's bounce category (HARD, SOFT, REDIRECT, UNSUB) matches the category stated for that address in the Ignored file.

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