WSN's bounced email detector helps you save server load and avoid being mistaken for a spammer (sending too many repeated messages to an address that rejects them can land you on shared blacklists which prevent your messages from getting through to other people in the future). It reads bounce notifications and automatically processes them for you. All emails to the deceased address are halted until the member updates their account or article. When the member next logs in, they see an alert on the page informing them that delivery to their email address failed and instructing them to update it. If they wish to re-try the failed address, they can edit without changing it.

You'll need to set up your bounce collector account as a real email account (not forwarder). Make sure you don't use the account for any legitimate email exchanges, because the sender of every message to the bounces account has their email deactivated in WSN and then the message is deleted. Ideally you should set a disk quota of no more than 5 MB on the bounces account -- tens of megabytes worth of messages will cause it to choke before it can process even one. Your hosting control panel will offer a way to set up the account. Ask your web host for help if necessary.

In versions prior to WSN 8.1.0, you run the bounce detector manually at Admin Panel -> Emails -> Bounce Detector and follow the on-screen instructions. Since 8.1.0 this has changed to an automatic process, where WSN checks on your behalf every 12 hours. If the IMAP login fails, WSN will send you an email notification.

Re-Approving E-Mail Addresses

If you want to give an email address another try, just edit the member or article it's associated with (whether it's your own or someone else's doesn't matter). Submitting the edit without changes will give the email another try.

Occasionally, you may want to re-approve all email addresses in bulk. For example, if you had a hacking problem on the server where someone was sending out a lot of spam which got you blacklisted then you may want to re-try after you've cleaned out the hack and asked various blacklists to reinstate you. To do this, go to Admin -> Miscellaneous -> Advanced and run these queries in the SQL box:
UPDATE {PREFIX}members SET inactiveemail=0;
UPDATE {PREFIX}links SET inactiveemail=0;