Dear Listers,
I have two programs I run regularly to purge the various Matronics email
lists of bad email addresses. I referred to these as my Email Weasels and
there is a daily version that is run automatically every night at midnight
and there is a and a monthly version that I run by hand at roughly 30-day
intervals.
The Daily Weasel grinds through the 8 to 10mb of bounced email that is
generated each day looking for obvious things like "user unknown", "host
unknown", and other things that usually mean the user's email address
doesn't exist any longer. The Daily Weasel has been purging 5 to 10 email
addresses each night.
The Monthly Weasel gets more serious about the task and sends a single
message to each list member with specially generated headers and content
information. Any bounces or replies to these messages are considered
errors and the email address is eligible for purging. This program is
particularly useful for "weaseling out" email addresses that are actually
being forwarded to by another email address that is subscribed to a List
and otherwise would not be identifiable. The Monthly Weasel purges roughly
100 nonexistent email addresses each month when it is run.
To check to see if your address has been removed by either of the Email
Weasel programs, you can check the Weasel Status Web Page at the following URL:
http://www.matronics.com/unsubscribed
If you find your email address on the Weasel List, but are certain that
everything is working fine now, simply go the Matronics Subscription page
and resubscribe your address. No harm, no foul. The subscription URL is:
http://www.matronics.com/subscribe
That all having been said, I've noticed that the Daily Weasel may have been
getting a little too aggressive in purging addresses recently and a number
of people have written asking if and why they'd been dropped from the List.
A couple of months ago I rewrote the Daily Weasel program to include a
wider variety of errors and more aggressively purge. One of the new purge
criteria that I added seems to occur a fair amount of the time (Connection
Deferred) even though the address is really okay.
As of today, I've removed the Connection Deferred criteria from the Daily
Weasel Rule set and this should decrease the number of "false positives"
and unnecessary unsubscribed.
Again, if you get unsubscribed by either of the Email Weasel utilities,
simply go to the subscription page and resubscribe:
http://www.matronics.com/subscribe
Best regards,
Matt Dralle
Matronics Email List Admin.
Matt G Dralle | Matronics | PO Box 347 | Livermore | CA | 94551
925-606-1001 V | 925-606-6281 F | dralle@matronics.com Email
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