Success.com sends out five to ten thousand newsletter emails a day, and I'm essentially the "webmaster" for the site, so I get all the bounced emails. I've been dealing with it for a long time, but I finally decided a couple weeks ago that I had had enough.

The site doesn't use a mailing list program or service because I wanted there to be a tight connection between the user's customer record and their newsletters subscriptions. So the newsletter subscription functionality on the site is all custom built. (And why should Success.com have to pay to send out emails when it has its own dedicated server that can do it for free?) The main drawback of this method, however, is that there isn't an easy way to handle email bounces.

There's a decent OS X app called eMail Bounce Handler that logs into a POP box and tallies up all the bounced emails, but it's pretty basic and hasn't been updated in almost a year.

So I went looking for a website that could handle my bounces for me. That's when I came across b*Bounce. The website is http://bbounce.com/. I refuse to link to them directly out of principle.

I signed up for their lowest tier, $9.95/month, just to test things out. I payed via PayPal, and then found out *after* I sent payment that the account wouldn't be created automatically - it had to be set up manually by someone. So I waited...and waited. Hours went by with no account and not even an email saying "thanks for your payment, your account will be set up soon." So I emailed them, and did not hear back.

After a couple days, I filed a PayPal fraud claim, and I still never heard back from them. Finally, today, PayPal ruled in my favor and gave me my $10 back.

So I guess this whole post was a long-winded way of saying: STAY AWAY FROM B*BOUNCE!