Feature request - ping testing email addresses to find inactive member accounts

In theory it is possible to collect member email addresses and send them away to some company we can't trust for an active address test (ping test).

Ideally, we could keep the addresses private inside our site, and do a ping test ourselves using a module dedicated to the purpose.

Is this technically possible, with the jamroom system?

Has it already been set up?


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PJ Matthews, Kyoto
Migrated from Ning 2.0. Now at Jamroom 6 beta and using Jamroom Hosting for The Research Cooperative (researchcooperative.org)
updated by @researchcooperative: 03/31/15 07:23:02PM

It is technically possible to do email address scrubbing inside Jamroom, it's just not something supported at this time. Note too that no validation method is 100% reliable, since the remote SMTP server can choose to respond however it wishes when try to prepare an email to a non-existent email address (or an existing one).

I have this on my TODO for our Email Support module, but it will likely be a few weeks before anything would be available.

Hope this helps!


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Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net

Brian,

Thanks for the clarification. Not urgent for me as I do not have a network running yet on Jamroom. From my own network administration perspective a series of steps might be needed, as protocol:

1. In the site Terms of Service, mention that members will be asked to confirm active accounts in the future, and that accounts may occasionally checked by one technical method or another.

2. Send a broadcast message to all members asking them to confirm their accounts in some way this can have the double function of telling all members that the network is still active, and may encourage more participation). If they can reply "YES" to a dedicated address for such replies, the responses could incorporated into the automated testing system (see next).

3. Send a Ping test or similar to all members that have not confirmed within a certain perod of time. Part of the Jamroom module for this might include a mechanism for excluding the confirmed members from the Ping test. It might also be good to exclude members who have only recently joined, or who have been active in the network within the last X months. Those are also factors that could incorporated into the ping testing module.

4. The final result might be a ping test that gives a few false negatives (for reasons outlined in Brian's reply) but that can fairly reliable identify inactive accounts that are not likely to become active again. Before deletng them, there could be another attempt at sending a broadcast to the all the apparently inactive members, or there could be a scheduled pause (two months?) before deletion takes place.

There might also be other criteria for NOT deleting apparently inactive profiles, such as the amount of useful information that a member has provided in their profile or in the network. If the profile has enough clues for others to find the person online, then maybe it is best to make the profile permanent, regardless of whether the account is active.


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PJ Matthews, Kyoto
Migrated from Ning 2.0. Now at Jamroom 6 beta and using Jamroom Hosting for The Research Cooperative (researchcooperative.org)