eMail Bounce Handler helps you clean your email lists from faulty addresses. The application uses a group of rules to recognize bounce email messages so that you can simply export their recipients’ addresses. Later, you can make appropriate decisions, like deleting the problem addresses from your lists.
The application has a straightforward interface, which has various tabs, labeled Bounces, Settings, Rules and Log. However, the help documentation is poor and leaves a lot of unanswered questions.
It is good that the tool supports POP3, APOP and IMAP protocols. Besides, you can use different types of security, such as SSL and TLS. Likewise, it perfectly integrates with Apple Mail and Entourage and processes text files or clipboard contents as well.
The whole thing is based on applying rules to detect bounce mail messages. Fortunately, there is a set of ready-made rules and you can add your own if it is necessary. A typical rule checks a part of the message, like the subject, body, sender and recipient, to see if it contains, begins or ends with a given string. Then, you should select what part to process and what to do with it.
Fortunately, you can probe the addresses on your list multiple times. Then, you can filter them based on various criteria. In this respect, hard bounces are those which show a permanent delivery failure while those that only fail temporarily are classified as soft. Likewise, you can use filters based on the number of bounces.
All in all, eMail Bounce Handler is a great help if you keep long list of recipients. Therefore, it is most useful for marketing and distribution purposes. Luckily, the product has a trial version that can process the first 100 bounce emails only.
Mia for Gmail (was Notifier Pro for Gmail) is a desktop Gmail client which sits politely in your menu bar.