But what happens if that message is finally delivered. Here's the

situation: We are currently set up to retry a message once an hour for

10 times (10 hours). Our VERP, as previously mentioned, is set to three

times in a week. If I understand the above correctly, after three times

of trying to deliver, it will VERP. What happens if the message is

delivered on the fourth, fifth, etc. time? Does it 'un-VERP'?

Nope, the third bounce blocked it.  It never gets anything from a successful delivery.  It's only tracking failures.

It seems to me that the retries and the VERP settings need to be in

sync with each other. For my case, if I want to capture all the

addresses that are not delivered in three days out of a week, I would

set it to 30 (three days times 10 attempts a day). While this would not

be perfect, it would be a lot closer. Right?

That's probably a lot closer.  However with a really good mailing list I would not expect so many temporary failures.  I really would set MercuryE to timeout in not less than 600 seconds (you might get by with somewhat less but 600 is a good place to start) to ensure that you are not simply trying to deliver to busy servers that timeout on you.  I use 300 seconds currently and almost never get one of these multiple delivery failures and then one that succeeds.  If I get a VERP bounce it's either because the the account is blocking, there is a problem on the server or the account is bad.  The account blocking and mailbox too fill are my most common errors.

So, I'm confused (no news there)...

We have a list that has exactly one message each week day (five messages a week) with VERP-based turned on. We have it set to suspend the address when it has had three errors in a week.

The help file is not very clear, but here is what I think would happen with this setting: Each week, resetting on Sunday, it will keep track of failed deliveries. If it fails three times in that week period, it will suspend the address and that evening/next morning at 2 a.m. (because I have it set to mail the VERP report daily and that's the time that it does it), we will get a report with the newly suspended addresses on it.

First, is that correct?

Ok... here's where my confusion comes in. On the morning after the first day this list went out, we got a VERP report with serveral addresses on it. The second day, more addresses and so on. I would have through that I wouldn't have gotten a VERP report until the morning after day three the first week, but that is not what happened.

So, we thought that maybe if an address failed three times in the same attempt (three times in one day), but that didn't make any sense because then any address that didn't get sent out in the first three tries would have been VERPed (which makes the reattempting to send the mail pointless).

Therefore, we don't know and I thought I would ask: Under what circumstances does an address get VERPed?

Thanks in advance!

\frank

First, is that correct?

Three failures to send the first message could do the same thing if the receiving system were sending back 400 series temporary failures instead of 500 series fatal errors.  A total of three bounces is all that is required and can happen quite quickly if your retry period is short enough.  Even with the default 30 minutes retry it would only require the server to be down for 90 minutes.

[quote user="Thomas R. Stephenson"]

First, is that correct?

Three failures to send the first message could do the same thing if the receiving system were sending back 400 series temporary failures instead of 500 series fatal errors.  A total of three bounces is all that is required and can happen quite quickly if your retry period is short enough.  Even with the default 30 minutes retry it would only require the server to be down for 90 minutes.

[/quote]

But what happens if that message is finally delivered. Here's the situation: We are currently set up to retry a message once an hour for 10 times (10 hours). Our VERP, as previously mentioned, is set to three times in a week. If I understand the above correctly, after three times of trying to deliver, it will VERP. What happens if the message is delivered on the fourth, fifth, etc. time? Does it 'un-VERP'?

It seems to me that the retries and the VERP settings need to be in sync with eachother. For my case, if I want to capture all the addresses that are not delivered in three days out of a week, I would set it to 30 (three days times 10 attempts a day). While this would not be perfect, it would be a lot closer. Right?

Thanks.