I realized last week that my algorithm for removing email recipients due to repeated bouncing is incorrect. We currently count the number of times a message to that user bounces. After 10 we remove them. But that's not right. Almost everyone will bounce 10 times in a long enough span of time. What we're trying to catch is people whose email is just plain failing time after time. So we should count the successive bounces, and when there's a success start over. Since I may not get to this right away I'm stopping removing users due to bouncing.

This explains why so many people complain that they have been inadvertantly removed. It also explains why we get so many bounce removals every day - it averages about 40 a week (which is a half a percent). I suspect the actual bouncing numbers should be less than half of that. That is good news for our numbers, which should now creep forward at a (realistic) faster pace.