Moos Skov Bounce Manager for MailPoet

Moos Skov Bounce Manager for MailPoet is an independent add-on for MailPoet for sites that do not use MailPoet Sending Service for delivery and therefore receive bounce messages through their own host, mailbox, or third-party SMTP provider.

Bounce handling is more complicated than simply deciding whether an email address “works”. A delivery can fail because the address is invalid, because a mailbox is temporarily unavailable, because it is full, because a message is too large, or because the receiving provider rejects a message according to local policy.

This plugin keeps those situations separate instead of treating every SMTP error as a dead address.

It can:

• detect supported permanent recipient failures and mark matching MailPoet subscribers as Bounced;
• import .eml, .mbox, .txt, and .zip files containing bounce messages;
• process every message in an MBOX batch and report the complete result instead of only counting changed subscribers;
• recognise MailPoet-style soft-bounce categories such as mailbox-full/quota, temporary delivery failures, and message-too-large failures;
• keep soft bounces in a persistent manual-review queue by default;
• keep SMTP policy rejections in the same review workflow while clearly labelling them as Policy rejection;
• count unique bounce occurrences without inflating the count when the same bounce message is imported again;
• show first-seen and last-seen dates for review entries;
• let an administrator mark selected review entries Bounced, Unsubscribe them through MailPoet, or dismiss them;
• ignore common automatic replies and out-of-office messages;
• protect configured sender addresses or complete domains from accidental bounce marking;
• inspect known MailPoet error storage on a scheduled basis;
• optionally inspect WP Mail SMTP Debug Events when that plugin/table is present;
• automatically resume a paused MailPoet sending job after an affected subscriber was successfully handled;
• keep a local diagnostic log of the most recent 400 events.

The plugin is not developed by, endorsed by, or affiliated with MailPoet. The MailPoet name is used only to identify the product this independent add-on integrates with.

Why there is a review queue

MailPoet distinguishes between hard and soft bounces.

A hard bounce normally means the recipient address is permanently invalid, for example a non-existent user or domain. Moos Skov Bounce Manager therefore marks supported hard-bounce cases as Bounced immediately.

A soft bounce means that delivery failed for a reason that may be temporary. The plugin currently separates these into:

• Mailbox full / quota
• Temporary delivery failure
• Message too large

By default these are not automatically converted into Bounced subscribers. They are stored under Bounces awaiting review, where you can decide what to do.

MailPoet documents that its own Sending Service counts repeated soft bounces by category and may eventually treat an address as hard bounced after repeated failures over time. Moos Skov Bounce Manager follows the same general idea by tracking occurrences, but it does not claim to reproduce MailPoet Sending Service’s private bounce-scoring system.

When an address has three or more unique review events, the Occurrences value is highlighted as a useful human-review signal. No automatic status change is made merely because the count reaches three.

Duplicate protection

Re-importing the same MBOX or EML file must not make a single bounce look like several separate events.

Moos Skov Bounce Manager creates a fingerprint for each detected review event. If the exact same bounce message for the same recipient and category is imported again, it is still counted as a reviewed message in the batch summary, but the subscriber’s Occurrences value is not increased.

A genuinely new bounce message for the same address receives a new fingerprint and increases Occurrences.

Policy rejections

SMTP responses such as 5.7.x, 550, and 554 can mean that a receiving mail provider rejected the message according to spam, reputation, authentication, transport, or other local policies. They do not necessarily prove that the recipient address does not exist.

For that reason, automatic policy-rejection handling is off by default.

Instead, policy failures are placed in Bounces awaiting review and labelled Policy rejection. You can then:

• leave the subscriber unchanged;
• mark the subscriber Bounced;
• explicitly Unsubscribe the subscriber;
• dismiss the review entry.

If your own workflow intentionally treats policy rejections as suppressible, you can enable automatic policy handling under Tools > Moos Skov Bounce Manager.

Automatic resume

Automatically resume MailPoet sending after a bounce was successfully handled is enabled by default and is located under Advanced.

This is a core reason for the plugin to exist. On a large list, a sending job that repeatedly pauses because of individual delivery errors can otherwise require repeated manual intervention.

Moos Skov Bounce Manager only attempts an automatic resume after it has matched the event to an existing MailPoet subscriber and successfully suppressed that subscriber, or after an administrator has handled an entry from the review queue.

You can disable automatic resume if you prefer to resume campaigns manually or if a future MailPoet release causes a compatibility problem.

MailPoet integration and compatibility

Where MailPoet provides a public integration API, Moos Skov Bounce Manager uses it.

In particular:

• subscriber lookup uses MailPoet’s public API;
• the manual Unsubscribe action uses MailPoet’s public global unsubscribe API so MailPoet records the unsubscribe through its normal subscriber-management path.

MailPoet’s public API currently does not expose a method that allows an integration to set a subscriber’s global status to Bounced. MailPoet also does not expose all of the internal operations needed to clear an already-paused sending job.

For these specific operations, Moos Skov Bounce Manager contains a deliberately small compatibility layer against known MailPoet structures. This layer is also used for optional read-only scanning of stored MailPoet error data because no public bounce-log API is available. For sending resume, the plugin first uses MailPoet’s own resume helper when available and only uses the compatibility fallback when necessary.

MailPoet explicitly warns integrators that internal classes and structures are not guaranteed to remain backward compatible. A future MailPoet release may therefore occasionally require an update to Moos Skov Bounce Manager. The Advanced automatic-resume option can be disabled independently if needed.

Bounce address

When using MailPoet with an “Other” sending method, configure a mailbox that actually receives the bounce messages from your sending provider.

MailPoet recommends using a bounce address on the same domain as the website/sending address when possible. For example, if your sending address is newsletter@example.com, a bounce address such as bounces@example.com is a sensible setup.

Protected addresses

You can enter addresses or domains that must never be marked as bounced, one per line. For example:

sender@example.com

@example.com

These are examples only. Replace them with addresses or domains appropriate for your site.

The WordPress administrator email is protected automatically. When possible, the plugin also protects obvious delivery and return-path addresses found inside imported messages.

Scheduled scanning

The plugin schedules a scan approximately every five minutes using WP-Cron. WP-Cron is traffic driven, so the exact timing depends on visits to the site and the site’s cron configuration.

The scheduled scan is intentionally not run on every page request.

Privacy / local data

Moos Skov Bounce Manager for MailPoet does not send bounce data, subscriber addresses, or diagnostic data to the plugin author or another external service.

Its local log can contain subscriber email addresses and short excerpts of mail-server errors. The log is stored in the site’s own WordPress database, is limited to the most recent 400 entries, can be cleared from the plugin screen, and is removed when the plugin is uninstalled.

The review queue stores email addresses, categories, occurrence counts, dates, short error reasons, and event fingerprints locally in the WordPress database. These records are also removed on uninstall.

The plugin integrates with WordPress Tools > Export Personal Data and Tools > Erase Personal Data for its own log and review-queue records. MailPoet subscriber data itself remains MailPoet’s responsibility and is not erased by Moos Skov Bounce Manager.