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MailBounce User Feedback
If you manage a mailing list -- especially a large mailing list -- then you would probably benefit by using MailBounce to manage bounces from your list.
But you don't need to take our word for it -- take the word of our satisfied MailBounce users, including Amnesty International, Apple Computer, Inc., CapitalOne Financial Services, Inc., J. Crew, the L.A. Times, NetCreations, Inc., PostMaster Direct Response, and StarNine Technologies, Inc..
Note: This page is dated, and many of the links are no longer active. This page will be updated with the next release of MailBounce.
For example, StarNine Technologies, developers of the ListSTAR list server, recommends MailBounce to their users for handling bounces from ListSTAR mailing lists. Also, Fog City Software recommends MailBounce as a bounce-handling utility for mailing lists hosted on LetterRip list servers.
SkyList mailing-list hosting services also recommends MailBounce for handling bounces from mailing lists:MailBounce is one of those applications that makes you say, "Why didn't somebody write this years ago?" As a commercial list provider, it has significantly reduced the daily maintenance of my lists and left more time to focus on making my customers happy. Smart Mail Solutions, Inc., is truly responsive to user feedback; each release turns requests into features.
SkyList also maintains a comparison of Macintosh mailing-list managers and features, including MailBounce support.
MailBounce has been the topic of discussion on many list-management mailing lists (and even mailing lists that do not deal with list management!) The following two posts appeared on a TBTF-related mailing list (reprinted here with permission from both parties):
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 14:18:20 -0400(Note: VAX/VMS is no longer a supported platform. -VS)
From: Keith Dawson <dawson@world.std.com>
[...]
BTW MailBounce runs everywhere -- Win, Mac, all flavor of Unix, even Vaxen. It is invaluable and Vince Sabio should get a medal, in addition to pots of money. http://www.mailbounce.com/
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 14:53:28 -0400
From: Chuq Von Rospach <chuqui@plaidworks.com>
MailBounce rules. Period.
--
Chuq Von Rospach (Hockey fan? <http://www.plaidworks.com/hockey/>)
Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com)
Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com)
<http://www.plaidworks.com/> + <http://www.lists.apple.com/>
Here are some other comments from MailBounce users; all comments are reprinted with permission:
I manage an Internet mailing list with upward of five thousand subscribers. I was spending entirely too much time simply managing the list and was seriously considering giving it up.MailBounce has also received some media attention ...Now that I use MailBounce, my management time of the list has dropped by 90%!
I wholeheartedly recommend the product.
Shawn M. King
President
King InfoMedia.
I handle a very large mailing list, and MailBounce removes bad addresses better than I could myself. With the way most people change e-mail addresses, I'd probably go crazy if I had to read each and every returned bit of e-mail by hand.
Travis Smith
Electronic Editor
Los Angeles Times Web Site
MailBounce saves me at least an hour every week!
Shannon Appel
(List manager of eight years)
The bigger my list grew, the more time I was taking out of my week to process an ever-increasing pile of bounces. It's hard to keep up with that, but you MUST, or the pile gets bigger and bigger! MailBounce takes the work out of it, and it lets ME decide how aggressive it should be in deleting those hard-to-track "soft" bounces, such as "mailbox full." I wouldn't want to run ANY list without MailBounce any more.
Randy Cassingham
Author, On-Line Humorist
"This is True"
I run a moderate-size announcement list (2,000 subscribers), and typically I was spending an hour or so a week dealing with bounce messages. MailBounce has cut that down to about 10 minutes! ... You combine a bunch of bounce digests into one big text file [and] export your subscriber list, then feed both of them into MailBounce. It goes through the bounce digest, extracts all the bad email addresses (including some formats that are totally obscure!), sorts them into "hard" bounces and "soft" bounces. It then looks at its history files to figure out how many times a given address has bounced. If the number of bounces is greater than the limit you set (I don't unsubscribe someone until they bounce two or three times in a row), then it compares the address to your subscriber list (and will do a pretty good job of matching up addresses where the bounce address is not EXACTLY the same as the subscriber address). Finally, it produces one file with "unsubscribe" messages to send to the list server, and another address list file that you can paste into Emailer or Eudora to send a "you have been bouncing and just got unsubscribed" message to everyone. MailBounce takes only a few seconds to process my 100kb bounce file on a PowerMac.
MailBounce really keeps surprising me by the number of things it handles correctly. Some of the bounces it catches are things that it takes me a minute or two to sort out from the hideously obscure bounce format. Obviously, there is an infinite varieties of bounce messages out there, and so far it looks like MailBounce catches 95% of them for me, so I still do a manual check of the [bounce] digests every few months ... but that is still a big savings in time.
I have to say that I am extremely pleased with MailBounce and also with its technical support. I've already recommended your software in my newsletter and website ... :)
Debbie Ridpath Ohi
Editor and Webmaster
Inklings E-Newsletter and Inkspot Web Resource for Writers
I love the product! Keep updating it, it's great. I could not have taken the time to do this myself; it's rare that I can find some software that I can just use. Generally, I end up getting frustrated and I write the code myself from scratch. I have no need to do that with your software and I know how much work it would take to parse all the errors individually. I'm very glad MailBounce exists!
Ryan Scott
NetCreations, Inc
PostMaster Direct Response
Given the erratic nature of list management services, I find there's actually less hassle processing bounces and unsubscribe requests using MailBounce rather than using my provider's service.You really have saved me tons of time. Before this, I had to process hundreds of bounces one by one on my own.
You produce an essential product that has saved me countless hours!
Steve Gordon
Editor
Amazing Hot Hollywood Gossip & TV Review
NETrageous SITEingsThe following excerpt is from the 16 March 1998 (TidBITS 420) issue of Adam Engst's TidBITS e-zine. The article was written by Technical Editor Geoff Duncan on the subject of mailing-list managers (list servers); the quoted text below is excerpted from the section on bounce handling:
Issue #16, August 29, 1997NETrageous SITEing of the week:
Smart Mail Solutions, Inc.'s MailBounceThis week we're recommending software rather than a Web site.
If you manage an e-zine or mailing list, and you'd like some help dealing with all the email returns (bounces), then check out MailBounce.
We use MailBounce to manage three of our bigger e-zine lists (with tens of thousands of subscribers).
MailBounce eliminates most the manual labor involved in keeping your lists 'clean.' It has saved us an enormous amount of time and grief. The only negative we've found is that the initial configuration and set up are "challenging" for novice users.
Technical Specs
Multi-Platform: The software runs on a Mac, UNIX, and Windows.
Multi-List software: All the popular ones, including ListProc, LISTSERV, Majordomo, ListSTAR, LetterRip, Macjordomo, and NTList. (It isn't necessary to run MailBounce on the same type of computer which runs your list software.)Freeware version: MailBounce Lite
Commercial versions: MailBounce Pro ($90 to $280)
Industrial strength version: MailBounce Pro PlusHighly recommended.
(Note: We have no affiliation with Smart Mail Solutions, Inc., other than as a happy customer.)Copyright 1997 by NETrageous Inc. All Rights Reserved.
[...]If you administer your own mailing list and want to use Hired Thug to process bounces, you can't. Hired Thug is tightly integrated with the TidBITS subscriptions system and can't easily be converted into a stand-alone utility. However, Vince Sabio's program [MailBounce] offers similar features, and it's designed to work with most mailing list software. I wrote Hired Thug before MailBounce was available, but if Hired Thug wasn't working so well and tailored precisely to our needs, we'd probably use MailBounce.
[...]
TidBITS 420 copyright 1998 TidBITS Electronic Publishing.
All rights reserved. Excerpted with permission.
If you would like to add your MailBounce feedback to this page, please feel free to contact us at
support@web.mailbounce.biz. We'd be happy to add your comments!
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Columbia, Maryland, USA |