Mailgun and bounce processing

ℹ️ Support
#1

I’ve been using phpList for many years, sending email using localhost, but am considering Mailgun to improve deliverability.

It does it’s own bounce processing, so I wondered how to synchronise/coordinate bounce processing with phpList’s.

Thanks in advance.

#2

@Jonathan11 Mailgun does not pass-on bounces to phplist, so it is not really possible to use the core phplist processing.

Mailgun uses “webhooks” to notify the sending system (i.e. phplist) of various events, such as bounces or other failures. I have some changes to the Mailgun plugin implementing a webhook that supports notification of bounces. The action taken is to blacklist the subscriber but that could be changed to delete the subscriber instead.
If you want to try that approach then I can build a new release of the plugin.

Another approach is to manually export bounced email addresses from Mailgun, then use phplist to mark them as blacklisted.

#3

Blacklisting sounds best. I think that’s what my phpList currently does (a cron job runs a process bounces script which checks a bounces mailbox).

I’d be interested in using your plugin - thanks.

#4

@Jonathan11 I have now updated the plugin to handle bounce notifications. Please see the plugin documentation https://resources.phplist.com/plugin/mailgun

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#5

Much appreciated.

Will this blacklist a subscriber after the first bounce, or will it take into account $bounce_unsubscribe_threshold (which I think is 5 by default)?

#6

@Jonathan11 T he notifications from Mailgun are for permanent errors. It won’t send to those addresses even if phplist continues to try to, so the only sensible action is to either delete them or mark them as blacklisted immediately.

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