Welcome to the first edition of E-mail Secrets.  Lately at Quiksoft, we have been talking a lot about cleaning up our e-mail address list.  Many of our customers have been asking how to reliably track the status of outbound e-mail messages, and how to update their address database when a message is returned undeliverable, otherwise known as a bounce.

In this article you will learn:

• Three very important reasons why your must clean your e-mail address list now
• What you need to know about how SMTP servers route bounced messages
• The secret to automatically matching bounced messages to addresses in your database
• The difference between hard and soft bounces and why you should track both
• Bonus secret to tracking failures on a mailing by mailing basis

This edition also contains downloadable sample code that will:

• Encode your outbound messages with the proper information so that they can be matched to your address database if they are returned undeliverable
• Scan your bounced messages and flag the addresses in your database
• Provide you with tons of phrases found in typical bounced messages, which can be used to programmatically discover their meaning