Colleagues, I apologize for belaboring the point about ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ bounces when I know we’re not using that terminology, but I wanted to be delve deeper into that conversation to try to get us to acceptable terminology we CAN use. To do so, I want to explain further what I’m talking about. As I stated on the call, my background is as a web hosting provider. Despite being a small business, I run a network with over a million domain names sitting somewhere on it, and about 517,000 individual mail accounts I am aware of. I want to be clear that the kinds of bounces I was talking about aren’t the kind when you give a bogus gmail or hotmail account. We’re talking about mail from independent resolvers that source back to an independent domain hosted on a server - the kind most often used by one of my web hosting customers, or a customer of that customer, or a customer of that customer of a customer, and so on. There are tons of reasons for a permanent message failure in situations like these, a lot of them server conditions that are temporary in nature. There’s a good chart worth looking at here: http://www.activecampaign.com/help/bounces-soft-bounce-vs-hard-bounce/ <http://www.activecampaign.com/help/bounces-soft-bounce-vs-hard-bounce/> I’m not a registrar, I’m a web hosting provider and a small business owner - so from my perspective I’m trying to make sure we adopt policies that will keep service tickets to a minimum. As a web hosting provider, I already incur a lot of support costs over the ICANN WHOIS validation process. Every week we have numerous customers who write us complaining of being ‘down’ because they missed an email and ended up getting their business presence suspended. I want to make sure that we adopt standards in a way that doesn’t disadvantage my customers or cause them to open service tickets that cost me money. I think getting the terminology right will be the best way to do that. ------------------------- Christian J. Dawson (703)847-1381 x 7120 Voice Chief Operations Officer, ServInt www.servint.net dawson@servint.com <mailto:dawson@servint.com> (703)847-1383 Fax -------------------------