Following the Bouncing Email

More of the Education Of Bob Due To OptEmail.Net: ListingWare has maintained the database of contacts that register through the web sites of our customers from Day 1 - we've never done anything like a mass-delete of old contacts or even deactivated saved searches of contacts, even if that search were 3 years old. Right now, we've got about 3 MILLION contacts in the database, with THOUSANDS of saved searches! We've always left it up to you, our customers, to maintain the contacts' records and perform tasks such as that.

Well...we've finally had to implement the first such task ourselves. In order to maintain 'non-spammer' status with big ISPs (Comcast, AT&T, AOL, etc.) and mail providers (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo!, etc.), we've started counting the number of bounced emails to each contact. If a HomeScanner Daily Update bounces back as undeliverable we notify you of it and we increment the bounce count by one. Once that gets to 5, we will stop sending emails to that contact only. Their login on your service will remain active and you can 'un-bounce' them from their contact record detail page.

This does take a burden off of you, as well as making sure we stay in the Internet's good graces. So, just keep this in mind - YOU do have some burden in making sure our service operates smoothly, but we're trying to make it as easy as possible!

Long Awaited Function - Export Contacts!

This is probably the feature that has been requested for the LONGEST time! Good things come to those...you know. Anyhow, it's finally here. When you go to the Visitors section of the Account Manager, there is now a link under the Contact Manager that says Export Contacts. You can export in either an Excel-compatible or tab-delimited format.

The main push for this to finally arrive is that we've launched the Public Beta of OptEmail.Net - and wouldn't you know that one of the first five people to signup had 3,000+ ListingWare contacts?!?! I had written a web-based synchronization, but it took several minutes to complete, which wouldn't cut it for the plans we have for OptEmail.Net. So, there you go - necessity is the mother of...you know that, too.