From Freegle Wiki

Bouncing Member Management

What is a Bouncing Member?

A bouncing member is a member who is not receiving email messages from your group. The email account may have been closed or deleted or the mailbox may be full. Either way, they cannot participate properly in your group.

Hard Bouncing and Soft Bouncing - What's the Difference?

A hard bouncing account is when the email account doesn't exist, or the member's internet provider will not accept any Yahoo emails. The account can still be reactivated.

A soft bouncing account is when any other errors are received by Yahoo upon sending a group email. If the account is soft bouncing for a number of days, the Yahoo account will eventually be deactivated. Again, the account can still be reactivated.

Why Do I Want to Remove Bouncing Members?

You may want to clean up any bouncing members so that you get a clearer idea of how many members there are on your group.

You can send members an email to try to reactivate their account. Yahoo groups periodically send automated test messages to bouncing members. If a test message isn't returned with an error, the account is reactivated.

You can also do this manually or automatically using the plug-in.

Managing Using the Plug-in

If you have the [moderators plug-in] it is fairly easy to do a regular check and manage any bouncing members. It is recommended to do this about once per month to keep on top of it and so that it doesn't take too long to do. You will need to leave it running for some time as, to prevent Yahoo from interfering, the plug-in can only make one change every 30 seconds.

1. Click on the members tab on the left hand side.
2. With the plug-in on, use the scroll button in the top right corner to find the bouncing members maintenance option and click on it.
3. You will be provided with a box to exclude and specific email addresses. Moderators and owners are automatically excluded however.
4. You will also be provided with a number of options. See the [plug-in Wiki] for further details.

• The plug-in finds all the bouncing members.

• It checks the bouncing history for the member.

• If the member has been bouncing longer than the minimum number of days you have input, and less than the maximum number of days you have input and has had at least the minimum number of reactivation requests sent then the member will be removed.

• Otherwise, a reactivation email will be sent to the member.

You can just leave the plug-in to run, it doesn't need any manual intervention.

Managing Manually

1. Click Members from the list on the left side of any page
2. Choose the Bouncing tab above the list of members
3. Choose the View History link under the "Bounce Status" column
4. Click Send Reactivation Request in the Email Account Reactivation section
5. The recipient must then follow the instructions in the Reactivation Request email. If the email doesn't bounce after 5 days, you can also go back to the Edit Members page and click the Reactivate Now button to manually unbounce the member.

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