Incorrect processing of bounced emails

[MatLudlam]

There should be something like "Show Original" in the email client.

Interestingly Outlook has a different set of menus when it has a delivery failure, and that is not one of the options.

I did try "Forward as attachment" to my Hotmail address and it came through correctly. I have also just tried a standard "Forward" but that destroys the information within it.

I have created a PST with 6 sample emails, all of which are processed incorrectly. The only one that I have investigated fully is cristina.tudorache@star-storage.ro. I can confirm that this has the bounced header with correct email address. It also has the original email that was sent within in. In Outlook you can even press "Send Again" and it will pop up the original email. All the mails are in the "Samples" folder.

As the PST is too big to upload here, you can get it from here: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AiQ6JPOdP3xck7VCSmfcnfug9RPrzg?e=p47jvK

[yuri]

There should be something like "Show Original" in the email client.

[MatLudlam]

> I would also say that a bounce should update the initial Contact / Lead record to say that the address is invalid, not just record it within the campaign. There is no point in sending any more emails to them.

Not all bounced mean that email is invalid. There are hard and soft bounced types. Soft bounced should not be marked as invalid. Example of soft bounced: the user exceeded the disk space limit.

Whilst I agree you are technically correct, of the 300+ email bounced that occurred, none of them were because of low disk space. So now I have 300 bounced items in a campaign, and I need to find some way of updating the Contact records manually to reflect that they have bounced. If I keep sending emails to bounced addresses then eventually I will get black-listed. The easy way of doing this is to just mark the Contacts as invalid. What else would you suggest?

Separately I have seen a request for the sample email again (cannot see it here). How would you like me to sent it to you. When I move from Outlook to the desktop it does something to the format of the mail. I can try and send to you as an attachment and also try to just forward it to you. Please let me know.

[yuri]

> I would also say that a bounce should update the initial Contact / Lead record to say that the address is invalid, not just record it within the campaign. There is no point in sending any more emails to them.

Not all bounced mean that email is invalid. There are hard and soft bounced types. Soft bounced should not be marked as invalid. Example of soft bounced: the user exceeded the disk space limit.

[yuri]

The bounced email should contain a unique ID. We extract it to know that the email is authentic. Otherwise one can forge bounced emails and do a harm to the business. VERP makes the provider to include the ID as a part of the "TO" address.

The approach to try to extract something in different ways depending on a provider is not good. Companies like Mircrosoft like to change response formatting often. We will stick to rely on VERP. I believe MS should support it.

Could you attach the full email original that I can open in a text editor?

[MatLudlam]

Hi Yuri - the bounced email is from Office 356 (who are our provider), so I would say a provider that matters.

The email that was returned is correct, it has the part with Content type: message/delivery-status, and that part has the correct header and the correct email.

I had 300+ emails bounce in 1 campaign. Only about 150 of them were processed correctly. I don't know what ESPO is going. What I do know, is that of the 300 mails about 295 of them all have the message/delivery-status and the correct header

I would also say that a bounce should update the initial Contact / Lead record to say that the address is invalid, not just record it within the campaign. There is no point in sending any more emails to them.

I would also say that the last part of the email contains the original email that was sent, so any token embedded within that can be extracted.

I have also turned on VERP so we will see if it is any better as there is another mail shot going out tomorrow.

[yuri]

I think bounced are process properly. But some mail providers do not bother to send a proper bounced messages. Can we cover them all? No. Can we try to achieve coverage of the most popular providers? Maybe. But not always. It can be problematic.

Try enabling VERP (Administration > Outbound Emails > Use VERP). This can improve bounce handling, but your email provider should support it.

Having only email address is not enough for bounced message. It should contain a unique ID that we send with the mass email message.

[MatLudlam]

Hi, I have set up a campaign which is email based. This sends out the emails, and the bounced emails come back to a given email box, where they are read by Espo.

Espo then processes the bounced emails, and updates the campaign statistics accordingly. I can then see the bounced emails by applying the filters within the campaign. So far so good, all works as expected.

Now the issue. Not all of the bounced emails are processed correctly by Espo.

I have attached one that is not correctly recognised (and I have plenty more).

I have analysed the email with a tool I put together, and you can see the output as a second attachment.

You will notice that the email contains a part with a Content Type of "message/delivery-status". I have not dumped the headers (but happy to if needed), however one of those headers is a "Finial-recipient" one, and it specifies "cristina.tudorache@star-storage.ro" who was the person for whom the email was originally destined, and has left.

So, if processed correctly cristina.tudorache@star-storage.ro should be tagged as bounced, however it is not.

Can you let me know why please?

PS - I would not normally share email addresses on a forum, but they are invalid so I thought it ok.