The discussion revolves around the possibility of allowing users to reset their own bounce scores. adamengst initially asks if this is feasible, as he often has to manually reset bounce scores for users experiencing email outages. However, awesomerobot explains that this is not currently possible and may be risky, as users could exploit the system by continuously resetting their bounce scores.
simon and Simon_Manning suggest alternative solutions, such as allowing site admins to reset bounce scores for multiple users at once or implementing restrictions on user-initiated resets, like email validation or limited reset options. adamengst acknowledges that while this feature would be helpful, it’s not a significant enough problem to warrant heavy campaigning.
I periodically get people who have email outages, are marked as bouncing, and then have to write to me once they realize they’re not receiving email notifications. I reset their bounce score and all is well.
Is there any way they could reset their own bounce score?
No there’s not a way to do this, and it’s probably a bit risky to do. I could, for example, continuously reset my own bounce score while continuing to bounce emails, which could cause problems with your email service.
I’ve run into similar issues when for one reason or another there is an issue with email delivery to a particular email service. For example, when all emails sent to AT&T email addresses start bouncing. I don’t think allowing individual users to reset their bounce scores is the solution for this, but some way of allowing site admins to reset the bounce scores for all users who have had bounced emails within a given period of time could be useful. Currently this can only be done from the Rails console.
It certainly shouldn’t be possible to reset one’s own bounce score completely freely but it doesn’t seem totally unreasonable to allow this with restrictions. For example, it might be that users should only be able to reset once after the last time they didn’t bounce or that it requires email validation similar to activation in order to reset (and only allow sending that email once)
That’s probably for a separate Contribute > Feature topic though and I don’t personally feel strongly enough about it to write it.
Yeah, this isn’t a huge problem for me either, and there would probably be almost as much tech support communication to teach people that they can reset their own bounce scores as to do it for them. I think it would be helpful, but not so much so I’d campaign heavily. 