nuevoMailer v.7.0

Bounce processing

User's guide

Licensing

Requirements

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USD 159.00 179.00 € £

You can process bounced (returned) emails resulting from your campaigns.

It identifies and flags the related subscriber accounts.
It updates the campaign statistics so you can see a "Campaign bounce rate".
It works with the IMAP protocol. It reads and scans the mailbox where bounces go.
You can operate it manually but you can also schedule it with a cron job.
Un-deliverable, bounced or returned email are equivalent terms.
You can also process bounces and complaints from Amazon SES. The endpoint script is provided. Learn more.

Features

Detects soft, hard bounces and automatic responses.
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 SMTP services and mail servers used in the communication process. You can add more rules in the xml file. In other words you can train this module to understand the type of bounces involved. This "training" is done by adding/removing lines/rules in the xml file. The most common bounce descriptions are included in the file. This approach has proven to be extremely flexible and of unique value especially to non-English server set-ups.
Multi-language: If for example the receiving mail server is using a language other than English then the returned emails can also come in this language. it depends on the operating systems involved. The returned emails usually contain numeric error codes. But this is not always the case. With this approach you can add your own bounce descriptions in the language of your choice in the xml file.

Configuration

In the settings page of nuevoMailer you can define to which email account bounces will go. This setting works even without the bounce manager.

At the bottom of the same page you will enter the related settings in order to read this mailbox:

When the mailbox contains thousands of messages, in order to avoid time-outs, you may set the number of messages to process in one go. In such cases it is also very convenient to create a cron job for this task. You can read details and find the scripts to set-up cron jobs for bounce processing inside the package.

Operation

Using Bounce Manager is very simple. This is the menu of the Bounce Manager.

First you click "Click here to process bounced emails".
The scanning of your mailbox starts. At the end you will see how many emails were found in the mailbox and how many were identified as soft, hard bounces, or automated responses.

You don't need to and it is not advisable to immediately delete a subscriber whose email address soft-bounced once. So bounce manager only updates the related subscribers.
You decide which subscribers to delete. You can delete those who bounced more than a given number of times (either soft or hard). But you may also keep these subscribers and just add them to the suppression list so they are excluded from your campaigns. Or set them as un-confirmed and again exclude them from campaigns. At some point in the future of course and if they continue to bounce it will be better to delete them.

After you process the mailbox go to your Welcome page. In the Welcome page you see the number of subscribers with bounces. Every subscriber has two counters: soft and hard bounces. So some of these subscribers may have more than one soft or hard bounce or both. If you want a more detailed report you can use the advanced filters of nuevoMailer.

When you delete the subscribers you see a very clear report.

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.
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.