As a web master, I often send out mass mailings. After the mailing is done, the bounced emails are returned to my Outlook. I go through them manually. The real bouncers are put in a “Bounced” folder and,  Out of office messages in the “Trash”. The rest of the emails are addresses I need to update in my database or people that wish to unsubscribe. Since sorting through 2000 bouncers can take up a lot of time, I did some research on how to automate this.

PHP offers a set of functions to connect to a mail server (IMAP/POP3).  The plan was to let my web server connect to the mail server and sort out the bouncers for me. Below is a little script to give you some ideas of what I came up with.