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Failed Mail

Question Background:
Failed Mail is an email message which has, for one reason or another, been unable to reach the intended destination and has been returned. The message usually has some information included to say why the email could not be delivered; for example, the email address doesn't exist, the destination server was not available for three days; the destination server rejected the message for some reason, etc.

Answer:
Efficient handling returned messages is essential to any list server product. Consider the following situation:

A company has a mailing list with 1,000,000 addresses on it and posts a message to it each year. Typically addresses on a mailing list change at the rate of 5% per month, so after one year, about 50% of the addresses will have changed. So each year, when the company posts a message to its 1,000,000 members, it can expect 500,000 to be returned. Experience shows that about 95% of these will return within minutes of posting. So with a high performance list server, something like 450,000 messages may be returned within an hour of posting.

There is no way that any human operator could manage these returned messages (if a human could remove one address per minute, it would take over five man years!) Clearly, managing these returned messages efficiently is extremely important. When a message is returned, the software must identify the failed address and place a mark against the member's record so that no messages are sent in future.

By using high performance, batch processing, GMS Communication Server is able to efficiently manage to removal and suspension of members when messages are returned.