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Price quote needed for GF mod/plugin

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Price quote needed for GF mod/plugin
Hello--

Anyone interested in this custom job please PM me with a quote (must be payable by VISA credit card) and an estimate of development time.

What I am specifically looking to add is remedial bounce management. I have a site that extensively uses email (subscriptions) to monitor post activity. To make matters worse, a valuable portion of my population changes work sites and thus email accounts regularly, so I get a bunch of bounces until email addresses are updated. I would like a programmer to develop a plugin/mod that would scan delivery failures of subscriptions and mod a profile (remove subscriptions and/or disable their account or [can discuss options]) after an admin defined amount of bounces over a defined period of time.

I currently have all mail to the site (bounces and spam) mailarc'ed into an admin forum. So I think it could be handled all in GF, but I'm not opposed to a perl cron job outside GF if that is a better option.

Thanks in advance.

Dave
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Re: [bretzke] Price quote needed for GF mod/plugin In reply to
Hi,

I've been thinking about this sort of thing for a _long_ time.

I like "secure" sites, and when a person changes their email address after sign up, the site is no longer secure.

I wanted to send out a MANDATORY 20 or 30 day email, to all users, which if it bounces, will flag the account as "at risk." If it bounces a second time, the account is shut down, until the user provides a vaild email address.

For some systems, I want to purge the database after 6 months of an inactive/shut down account.

I wanted this to run under "community" but to make it work some pieces are still missing.

Because of the various things this has to do, and hooks it has to have into a fuzzy logic scheme, and program flow, it's not a $100-$200 job. It's not a "linear" logic flow as it might seem: eg:

bad email -> read headers -> flag user account -> 2nd bad email -> flag user account --> if n bad tries disable.

Looks good, doesn't quite work ;)

If you'd like to pursue this, contact me on the http://ultranerds.com forum.

The code I've been thinking about will read any pop/email account it's given access to, and will assume _any_ message there is a bounce. It will NOT try to figure out bounces from good email, so you need a bounce account. (spam will just be ignored, since the email address will most likely not be in your database).

It will be able to disable/update any GT::SQL product it has permissions for (this is iffy, unless remote community logons are enabled/available, and they are not yet).

Anyway... if you are interested, contact us. It's a key item for almost any system that sends out email, but it's not an easy thing to make "work" in a hostile environment.


PUGDOG� Enterprises, Inc.

The best way to contact me is to NOT use Email.
Please leave a PM here.
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Re: [pugdog] Price quote needed for GF mod/plugin In reply to
Quote:
I like "secure" sites, and when a person changes their email address after sign up, the site is no longer secure.
Well, you are right, that when somebody changes email, and if it's not validated, it not safe anymore.
BUT: this is the point, when the new email address should be validated before it is made active...

Best regards,
Webmaster33


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Last edited by:

webmaster33: Oct 16, 2004, 5:02 AM
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Re: [webmaster33] Price quote needed for GF mod/plugin In reply to
No, you are missing the point.

A person joins with myemail@somedomain.com

They respond to that, then validate their account.

They then delete that email address, or it's deleted as a "bogus" address by the system it's on.

That user now has validated access to your system, with no way to track them down.

If the system re-validates email addresses every 30 days, that user would be caught, and his account disabled.

The system would re-validate by checking for bounces. It's not 100%, but it's good enough for most things.

If you were really paranoid, you could send out a re-validate request every 90 or 180 days. This is somewhat different than the above situation.

For some systems, that would really be a valid option. Systems that get a lot of college/hacker type traffic, or appeal to that sort of user, would benefit from an email re-vaildation even as often as every 30 days.


PUGDOG� Enterprises, Inc.

The best way to contact me is to NOT use Email.
Please leave a PM here.
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Re: [pugdog] Price quote needed for GF mod/plugin In reply to
Quote:
A person joins with myemail@somedomain.com

They respond to that, then validate their account.

They then delete that email address, or it's deleted as a "bogus" address by the system it's on.

That user now has validated access to your system, with no way to track them down.
It seems you miss the point.
When user "deletes that email address", or "deleted as a "bogus" address by the system", then they will NOT have any validated email address. If he changes the email address, the new email address should be also validated, so changes doesn't take place until the new address is not validated...
That's how it should work.

Of course, I aggree, that it's fine to check for bouncing emails, and revalidate them. But that's another thing.

To be even more safe, email validation by a link is not enough. There should be used a user assisted image recognition technique, too. That can be still overrided by OCR recognition software (server), but that would have much less chance...

Best regards,
Webmaster33


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Last edited by:

webmaster33: Oct 16, 2004, 8:44 AM
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Re: [webmaster33] Price quote needed for GF mod/plugin In reply to
Paranoia reigns supreme..

A bounce manager is a very simple thing to do and can be run seperately to all else. The only need is to detect soft from hard bounces.. And can be integrated into any existing system easily.

The 2 hard bounces means the person is no longer there, they have no further interest in your product (or whatever) - so delete them. What is difficult about that equation?

Simple.
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Re: [webmaster33] Price quote needed for GF mod/plugin In reply to
You are still missing the point completely.

User joins LinksSQLbasedsite.com with the user name bogus_troublemaker and email notme@validdomain.com

After he gets the validation email, at notme@validdomain.com and creates an account on LinksSQLbasedsite.com the email address notme@validdomain.com is expunged.

The user is still a valid user on LinksSQLbasedsite.com -- and unless the email is re-validated, will always be one.

But, you now have no way of finding out who "bogus_troublemaker" is, or where they are from, when problems happen.

Is that more clear?

Bounced mail is a _GOOD_ way to keep checks on if the email address is valid. It's not perfect, but a valid email account should be monitored/owned/managed/superusered by *someone*.


PUGDOG� Enterprises, Inc.

The best way to contact me is to NOT use Email.
Please leave a PM here.
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Re: [Gypsypup] Price quote needed for GF mod/plugin In reply to
Seems really simple, doesn't it ;)

Try writing one.


PUGDOG� Enterprises, Inc.

The best way to contact me is to NOT use Email.
Please leave a PM here.
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Re: [pugdog] Price quote needed for GF mod/plugin In reply to
Ok, your post above last one, now makes clear, what you want to do.
But your original sentence what you wrote about email address change, was not valid in this form:
Quote:
I like "secure" sites, and when a person changes their email address after sign up, the site is no longer secure.
I meant, that user changes email address in the LSQL or GComm system.
And you, likely meant that the user deletes the email address, the email account itself...

Probably that was the misinterpreted part of our discussion.

As I wrote earlier, I aggreed with what you wrote about "bounced mail" problem.

Best regards,
Webmaster33


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Last edited by:

webmaster33: Oct 17, 2004, 11:21 AM
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Re: [Gypsypup] Price quote needed for GF mod/plugin In reply to
Ask Yahoo or Ebay about paranoia. Likely it's not an accident, that their system seems to be "paranoid".
BTW: "What is possible to do, will be done by somebody..."

Best regards,
Webmaster33


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Last edited by:

webmaster33: Oct 17, 2004, 11:22 AM
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Re: [pugdog] Price quote needed for GF mod/plugin In reply to
Hi Pugdog,

If you are going to do a plug-in of this I'd be interested as well if that's also OK with bretzke. If it was possible to have language templates for the emails since I'd be using it in French.

Thanks, John
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Re: [Jag] Price quote needed for GF mod/plugin In reply to
Hi,
As I said, this is not easy, but writing it specifically for one product, like Gforum, is ptentially easier, yet not efficient.

GT has some of the code done for bounced message handling, but what needs to be done is a tie in to reading the message, looking for bounce headers, pulling out the user ID, and flagging the account.

Then, code has to be written to make the send-message routines check to see if the user account is valid or not, not quite the same as the user opting out of email.

There are certain management functions that are also needed.

It would be much better to have this all go through "community" but it's more complicated as well.

With the forthcoming (eventually?) release of the next generation of GT products, and tighter integration (the SQL/etc engines have been merging each new release) much of this functionality may be built in, or easier to tie in.


PUGDOG� Enterprises, Inc.

The best way to contact me is to NOT use Email.
Please leave a PM here.
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Re: [pugdog] Price quote needed for GF mod/plugin In reply to
Hi,

I've just read the original post again (and the title) must have been late when I was reading it. I actually thought it was about Community for some reason because I would like to be able to use it with both GForum and LinksSQL and Community seems to be the best way to do that...

Anyway keep me in my mind when things unravel with the 2005 rollout Wink

John
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Re: [Jag] Price quote needed for GF mod/plugin In reply to
I was not happy with the way Community worked, out of the box, for what I think are the reasons above. I did some changes to basic Community code (which I would be happy to post if someone would like). This is what I did:

1) I changed the default on registration from Enabled "Yes" to Enabled "No"

2) Made sure that Subscribe is set to "No" in Links and Forum on registration

3) Set Forum Enabled and Links Enabled to "No"

4) Allowed Community to create users in Links and Forum, just not enabled.

On Validation, I hard coded all enabled to change from "No" to "Yes", Subscriptions update to how set in Community.

Further, I changed code so that if I just change the button Enabled in Comm from "Yes" to "No", the system changes Links Enabled and Forum Enabled to "No", All subcsribed options to "No", Links Status to "Closed" (An eNum option I added), Forum Enabled to Disabled, etc.

When I send an e-mailer, I just have to take the e-mail from the bounced messages, search Comm, Disable the account, and it closes the user in all areas, unsubscribes them, etc. Very clean!
dave

Big Cartoon DataBase
Big Comic Book DataBase
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Re: [carfac] Price quote needed for GF mod/plugin In reply to
Hi,
That's very interesting thanks for sharing that. I have both Links and Forum and I only allow access to the Forum for editors but I can see how your workaround would be useful.
I'm not sure when the next version of GT Community is planned for but hopefully we'll be able to provide some input on how we use it or would like to use...

John
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Re: [carfac] Price quote needed for GF mod/plugin In reply to
GT has bounce message handling code in some of their other products. I've looked at it, but it's not totally clean enough to cut out and port.

Hopefully, the next release of community will have bounce handling. I'd hoped it was going to be included in the more robust newsletter code.

Additional email accounts are not an issue any more, and code exists for checking webmail, pop, and other accounts automatically, so it really a matter of clean, and secure, integration into existing core modules.

There is just so much to do, you (programmers) end up going in circles trying to get all things updated and on the same levels.


PUGDOG� Enterprises, Inc.

The best way to contact me is to NOT use Email.
Please leave a PM here.
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Re: [pugdog] Price quote needed for GF mod/plugin In reply to
Has anyone looked into perhaps making Mojo Mail a plugin? It has all the bounce handling and a blacklist feature, plus the mail management. I just want it to integrate with Linkssql to remove the user from the database associated with a bounce or unsubscribe request and add them to the blacklist.

I will probably use it externally, but the new subscribe by category seems to make it worth keeping it all somehow within Links.