Filtering out bad email addresses

[christopher.webb]

NewsletterPluginForumPost_09042024

Hello,

We are in the process of migrating my customer’s website (https://signetcontemporaryart.com/) to a new host. The old host is Thost and my customer wants everything moved to Siteground, with the exception of email which she wants hosted with Google/Gmail.
We’re still working on email migration and the rest of the site migration process, but the site is basically hosted with the new host now (in that there are address records in the DNS settings of the old host pointing to the IP address of the new host).
On Saturday 6th April 2024, my customer sent out a newsletter for the first time since moving to the new host, then received the following email:

“Dear Signe

Оur e-mail monitoring system has detected a large number of rejected e-mails (SMTP error 550) sent by your account signetcontemporaryart.com. SMTP error 550 is a permanent error, meaning that the e-mail will not be accepted by the remote server. The reasons for receiving error 550 may be different – the recipient address does not exist, the recipient is blocking your e-mails or the remote mail server considers your e-mail as SPAM.

The best practices for sending e-mail and managing mailing lists are to not retry addresses that have returned a 550 error, as this is a permanent error. It is advised to remove any recipients from your address book/mailing list, that you have received a 550 error for.

Many e-mail providers will blacklist sender IPs that have a high count of 550 errors. In order to prevent our e-mail servers from being blacklisted, we have temporarily disabled the e-mail functionality for signetcontemporaryart.com. As this is the first occurrence for your account, you can remove the limitation. You can do that by reviewing this case notification in your Client Area and clicking on the “Enable Mail” button below. Please only do so after reviewing the bounced e-mails you have received and sanitizing your address book/mailing list.

Please bear in mind that repeatedly generating 550 errors can lead to permanently disabling the e-mail functionality for your account. You can re-activate your account this way only once more. If our system detects large amounts of 550 errors more than twice, the e-mail functionality will be permanently disabled on the 3rd time.

Best regards,
The SiteGround Team”

A ticket was raised with Siteground support who suggested it might be the newsletter plugin and that we should put a captcha on the newsletter sign-up window to prevent this from happening in the future. As for now, one of the things they suggested was to check all the email addresses in the mailing list to make sure they’re not spam email addresses. Just wondering if you have any advice for filtering out the bad email addresses from the mailing list? There are over 4600 addresses, so it would be great if this could happen in bulk.

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