I hope you found this article useful in your efforts to clean your address list.  If you have any suggestions for future topics, please let me know.  You can find my contact information at the bottom of this page.

Bonus.  Measuring failures from a specific mailing...

Some of our customers want to measure the count of delivery failures for each mailing they do.  We showed you how to embed an id into the "reverse-path" so that it is easy to match the bounced message up with the address in your database, but you can even go a step further by inserting a mailing identifier as well.

Lets say you want to keep track of the number of bounced messages for a specific mailing, and lets assume that each mailing is represented by a row in a table.  The row has a unique id field which is the mailing identifier.  You can encode the mailing identifier onto the account portion of the reverse-path like this: bounce_1063_34@yourdomain.com, where 1063 is the id of the address and 34 is the id of the mailing.  You can then modify your database update routine to flag the number of hard and soft bounces for each mailing as well as each address.

Links

Using Bounced E-mail Messages to Clean Your Address List