Easiest way to clean email addresses

[K2]

OK, color me stupid, but when you get email bounced back what is the fastest way to find the username that matches that email to purge the account?

[Tristan Perry]

Check where the bounced e-mail came from, then run a search by e-mail address to find who owns the false e-mail address.

[K2]

OK, let me get this straight, I tried putting the "@" in the seach box to test it and all that came back were posts with the @ sign and not the population of the members email addresses.

[Amacythe]

Try the memberlist/search by email or in the admin control panel/View or Delete Members and sort by email.

[K2]

Thanks much, that works great! I guess when you own a high powered forum you need to explore all of the features.

[TarantinoArchives]

Another question on this:

I am interested in decreasing the number of inactive members. Thats also why i am interested in deleting inactive accounts. Is there a possibilty of a MOD being written that lets me check what email adresses are DEAD and then delete those accounts?
Like some Admin MOD that lets me send out new activation emails to, for example a usergroup with 0 posts, and i can set how long those have time to re-activate their accounts and then it gets deleted?

you see, i have a board with over 3500 members, but over half of them are inactive. And its hard to fight that, because i cant even create a membergroup based on activity, only on posts. and i dont want to throw out "lurkers", i want to throw out people who signed up in 2003 or soe and have "last online: never" or something like that...

[K2]

Amen to that idea. That is one of the biggest thorns in my side. Whenever I mass email my members I get deluged with undeliverable mail and my host emails me threatening to suspend my website.

[TarantinoArchives]

Amen to that idea. That is one of the biggest thorns in my side. Whenever I mass email my members I get deluged with undeliverable mail and my host emails me threatening to suspend my website.

yeah, and those members who ARE ACTIVE, are bothered because you write them all the time.

this is really a problem for big boards like mine where i want to take care of my community and stuff

[Amacythe]

Why bother sending members that have never returned an email?  If they return, they can register again.  I would just go into the view members option of the Admin Control Panel and sort the order by last online... then use the checkboxes to go down the list... and delete all that haven't been on for X amount of time.

[K2]

Why bother sending members that have never returned an email?  If they return, they can register again.  I would just go into the view members option of the Admin Control Panel and sort the order by last online... then use the checkboxes to go down the list... and delete all that haven't been on for X amount of time.

I don't think you get the big picture. It's not about sending people email. It's about being able to easily purge the database of bogus email addresses with ease. Although your solution may be quasi effective it isn't truly rational. One of my fourms has over 17,000 members. When the server bounces 2,000 of them back to your inbox and crashes your outlook express and firewalls you would get the drift. When your host threatens to shut down your account because it overwhelms the mail server then you would feel the associated pressure to keep things right.

[Amacythe]

ahhh, but if you delete the non-posters first, you wouldn't get that many daemons.

[TarantinoArchives]

ahhh, but if you delete the non-posters first, you wouldn't get that many daemons.

so you wanna browse some thousand members by hand and delete? i am talking about a bulilt-in function that would test authenticiy of an account and delete if it turns out that its invalid. i dont want to delte just "non-posters", i want to get rid of accounts that are just not used, be it because somebody signed up and forgot this account or somebody signed up twice and didnt tell me. it is the prime objective of community management to have overview of your community. dead accounts kill your productivity and efficiency, dont you think?

[Webby]

Maybe somebody can write a script for this ?

[TarantinoArchives]

Maybe somebody can write a script for this ?

that is what I hope. In General, some extension in functionality of the memberlist-related admin functions, integrated authenticity check function, and a function to check activity of accounts that were carried over lets say from a YabbSE forum, because most of MY dead accounts are older than my SMF install and are still from YabbGoldSE1 times

[K2]

I brought this subject up a couple of years ago too. For some reason it is dead in the water. With huge member bases this is a feature that in my opinion MUST be addressed pretty soon or there will be a huge loss of functionality with administration of the SMF boards. Maybe it just can't be done, but then again maybe it can be done, and nobody has the ability to figure out how to script it. I wish I had scripting talents because that is one thing I would surely work on.

[Oldiesmann]

Well, if you could get PHP to detect the status code returned by the remote mail server, then you could figure out which email addresses cause a problem and delete those accounts. There are a couple drawbacks to this though:

You might end up deleting an account for a user whose email was unavailable due to a server crash
You'd have to test each address individually because some mail servers prefer to bounce back one message even if multiple addresses on their server were unavailable

I am still looking to see if there is a way to get PHP to check the status code returned by the remote mail server. Servers almost always return a status code of 550 if the email was unavailable.

[NoRad]

I'm personally sick of people tracking my user registrations based on Email. I think Email is a tool of the past and wish that SMF would be a pioneer in using some new methodology of user verification. My Email address is lie my social security number. I hate giving it out anymore, and the idea of having stupid accounts on Yahoo or MSN specifically for the purpose of registering on forums is getting old.

That being said, it would be nice to remove all of the dead Emails and inactive members (assuming that they are both). I like the secret question approach. I don't like the "what does the box below say" thingy that other sites and services are using BECAUSE I CAN'T READ WHAT THE BOX SAYS. =(

* Radianation is done ranting.

p.s. When I send mass Emails out, I use a SPECIAL emailbox (luxury of running my own mail server). I then setup a rule that any messages bounced back go to a lame account called "dump"... I can then sort through dump at my leisure instead of clogging my personal email box. I think a nifty perl script could scan the Emails in the dump folder for the address and put it into a cvs file or something. Then use that file as a list to purge accounts in SMF with some queries determining if the user is inactive or not before deleting. It doesn't sound to hard, but I'm not good with perl for scanning a list like that.

edit - this assumes that you have access to the emails as standard text files (think of collecting information from logs). They sit on my server in files like this and aren't inside of an outlook database file or w/e until I download them.

[K2]

I think that being able to purge accounts with invalid email addresses is a problem that won't be solved much like curing the common cold. It seems simple, but really is very hard.

[[Unknown]]

Radianation, I agree with your rant, but... what other kind of verification can be used?

It's the fact that you have to give an email address that "tames" registrants.  Otherwise it would be like enabling guest posting .

I also agree with the "what does the box below say" rant.  People keep trying to say SMF needs it, even David and Grudge, but I am very firmly against it.  It simply makes things harder for the users, and doesn't really provide that much protection.

-[Unknown]

[NoRad]

That's the million dollar question, isn't it? What else besides Email. I don't have a simple answer to make it all work, but maybe the discussion will spark some ideas. Here are a few more thoughts:

Email only makes it a little more time consuming for an annoying poster to create accounts after being banned. It doesn't stop identity fraud. Public free Email accounts like Yahoo and Hotmail (and now GMail) are so abundant that it's often difficult to trace the users using Email anyways. Plus, half of my new users are on free Email accounts and the confirmation Email is often lost in the junk mail folder of these services (and my server is not on ORDB).

So, does Email really provide any added security? You could just as easily require the user to fill out their account with more information than just a login name and a password to gain access. Tracking a user by IP address is fairly effective for security purposes. I can easily see who's been creating fake accounts and who shares a computer with the features in the SMF admin panel.

I'm just as protective of my AIM/ICQ/MSN/Y! names as I am my Email, but some people might find it easier to get an AIM message with a confirmation URL instead of Email? It's instant (but they have to be online).  I don't know...