Generally, when you send an email message and it fails to be delivered, you get a “bounce back” to inform you of this.  This delivery failure notification system is inherent in the way email works and does a good job, in general.  However, it has some serious limitations:

• The failure notice is spam filtered or otherwise lost, you will never know the message wasn’t delivered.
• Email spoofing is prevalent and that can cause you to receive all kinds of “backscatter” failure notices about messages that you never sent.  As a result, you may be blocking or deleting failure messages or may merely not notice a real failure notice amidst the back scatter garbage.
• The failure messages are long and in varied formats.  It may be difficult for the average person to determine the actual reason for the failure.
• If you have many failure messages (e.g. because you are sending out a newsletter) it is hard to convert a bunch of failure messages into a list of failed recipients together with the reasons for the failures.
• It is not simple for a manager to get reports of send failures by his/her staff … which may be very important so that business opportunities are not lost.

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We recently talked about the problems created by backscatter or bounce back spam.  I.e. the pain caused by getting lots of "delivery failure" messages for messages that you never sent, but which arrive at your door anyway. One of the solutions we have provided for dealing with backscatter, if you have this problem, is to create a custom email filter in your LuxSci WebMail interface that will delete or save all bounce messages.  While this works well, it also has a drawback.

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