Bounces processing

Features

• You can define multiple bounce servers.
• You can connect an smtp server to a specific bounce server.
• It detects soft, hard bounces and automatic responses.
• It extracts the related subscriber and campaign IDs.
• It does not automatically delete subscribers. You decide who/when to delete.
• You can set thresholds for automatically suppressing subscribers.
• It updates the campaign statistics and you have a complete bounces report.
• You can initiate the processing either manually or automate it using a cron job.
• If you use MailGun, Amazon SES or SendGrid you have dedicated webhook listeners to to process bounces (permanent and temporary) and complaints.
  Learn how to configure in the online help.
• Highly configurable: each un-deliverable email is scanned and compared to a collection of bounce reasons included in a simple xml file. A returned email may contain various descriptions (reasons) of why it bounced depending on the mail agents used in the communication process. You can edit the xml file, add more reasons or change what should be regarded as soft or hard bounce. The most common bounce reasons and numeric error codes are included in the file.
• Multi-language. The returned emails usually contain numeric error codes. But there are cases where such a code is missing and instead you find a bounce description in a language other than English. With this approach you can add your own bounce descriptions in the language of your choice in the xml file.
• Un-deliverable, bounced or returned email are equivalent terms.
  A soft bounce is also called transient or temporary. A hard bounce is also called permanent.

Benefits of processing bounced emails

• According to Amazon Simple Email Services guidelines, If your bounce rate is higher than 5-6% then you are in the danger zone of getting blacklisted.
  This also applies to other major email account providers.
• By removing subscribers who bounce you maintain a clean mailing list. You will get less bounces in the next campaign.
• This will result in improved deliverability: ISPs do not like to receive emails that will bounce. Therefore you minimize the chances of having your IP or email getting blacklisted and thus having your newsletters rejected as spam.
• Your tracking reports become more accurate.
• Overall, your email marketing effort becomes more focused.

Configuration

Operation

if you want to process the mailbox manually you click at "Click here to process bounced emails". The cron job does exactly the same.
The scanning of your mailbox starts and in the end you will get a similar report:

It is advisable here to look both at your Home page and your campaign reports and verify that subscribers were updated.

Cleaning up subscriber with bounces

Every subscriber has two counters: soft and hard bounces. The processing only updates the related subscribers.
You can then delete or suppress or set an un-confirmed the subscribers according to their soft/hard bounce values.
It is not advisable to immediately update a subscriber whose email address soft-bounced once.
Instead a good rule of thumb is to suppress subscribers having at least 2 soft bounces or 1 hard.
By suppressing subscribers you still keep them in your system but exclude them from future campaigns.
Processing results example: