GroupMail’s Subscriber Add-on can automate the task of removing invalid, undeliverable and bounced email addresses and unsubscribes from your list. It does this by identifying bounced emails and unsubscribe requests by subject lines, extracting the email addresses from the bounced or unsubscribe messages and either excluding these addresses from future mailings or removing the recipients from the group(s) altogether. A Stored Procedure can also be specified to handle the bounced messages.
When an email to a recipient bounces, it is not always desirable to remove it from the mailing list immediately as the bounce may have been caused by a temporary problem (for example account quota exceeded, mail server / internet connectivity downtime etc.) You can set Subscriber to specify the number of bounced messages that need to occur before the recipient is excluded/deleted; giving you complete control over your bounce management strategy.
There are a number of Bounce Rules pre-installed in Subscriber which will identify the majority of bounced messages in an account. The bounces are generally identified by the contents of the subject line. For example, the highlighted rule in the image below identifies a bounced message as one which contains Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender in the subject line. As such, Subscriber will treat it as a bounce.
There are two types of bounces that are recognized by Subscriber:
- The Hard bounce type indicates that the non-delivery of the message is caused by a potentially permanent problem (for example email account / user no longer exists).
- Soft bounce type indicates that there is a temporary problem delivering the email (for example user account quota exceeded).
To change an existing bounce rule, simply highlight the rule in the list, and choose Modify. Similarly, to remove a bounce rule simply highlight the rule and click Delete. You can also create any number of new rules as required to satisfy your particular configuration and strategy.
To specify how bounces are handled once they are identified, click on the Home button on the Subscriber toolbar and choose the Maintenance link as shown below. Alternatively go to the Tools menu and choose Manage Bounces.
From the Manage Bounces screen, you can control the actions that Subscriber will take when finding messages based on the bounce criteria that you set.
When an email message is sent to a group of any significant size, some email addresses are bound to be no longer valid or not accessible, which will result some emails bouncing. It is not desirable to immediately remove the bounced address from the group or exclude it from future mailings after 1 bounce occurs as it may be a temporary delivery issue. On the other hand it is pointless repeatedly sending emails to addresses that always bounce.Subscriber allows recipients to be deleted/excluded after a certain number (or threshold) of bounces occur. In the figure above, the recipients’ details will be deleted from all groups if either 1 hard bounce or 1 soft bounce occurs. You can change these values as you desire.
- Exclude Recipients: Check this option to add the bounced email address to the exclusion list.
- Remove Bounced Recipients from All Groups: Tick this option if you want recipient details to be deleted from all groups, when the bounce threshold is reached.
- Execute Stored Procedure: Check this option to specify a stored procedure to handle updating your database with bounce details when the threshold is reached.
You can also identify “friendly” emails that you know are valid but which might have technical issues during sending so that those addresses won’t be affected by the rules you specify.
Watch a short video showing how to configure GroupMail’s Subscriber Add-on.
Managing bounces is an essential part of successful email marketing. Using the right tools will make the effort much easier.
I have set up the bounce system on the add ons
how do i extract the emails that have bounced???
is they API or code that i can use back into my PHP database platform to flag these bounces
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Using Subscriber and writing to a SQL DB with a stored proc, but trying to find out what I need to do to have GM find the email in the BODY of the message. I added custom bounce rule [Message Body][Contains]‘Delivery to the following recipients failed’, and it appears to be working, however the Log file shows only the header was downloaded/process and the real email was not added, instead I have a bunch of postmaster@ emails that the stored proc wrote to my DB.
This is what I am seeing in the log:
Downloading message 96 (headers only)
From: postmaster@subzero.com
Subject:SPAM-LOW: Delivery Status Notification (Failure)
- Checking Account Rules for match ….
- Downloading message…
- Account Rule match found.
- Stored Procedure executed
- Message deleted.
Please advise on how I would get it to find email in the body of the message.
Hi Sahat. You can add a new bounce rule in Subscriber but rather than saying
Subject line [equals] Mailer-Daemon…
use
Subject line [contains] Mailer-Daemon
This way, all subject lines that contain “Mailer-Daemon” will be processed in line with the rules that you set up. Even if the full subject line contains recipient specific domain references.
I hope that this helps.
sorry, just find out that the bounce tolerance for hard is set to 2, so the customer email is not added to exclusion. But the other email address inside the mail is added because it’s repeated a few times in all bounce email.
Solution works for me:
1. Adding familiar email
2. Set hard bounce tolerance to 1
3. Reprocess all emails
thanx.
Hi, I used the subscriber add on to manage the bounce emails, but am having the same problem as Dick. All of my bounce email is from an email address like Mailer-Daemon@domainname.
Is there any solution how to work this out?
Hi Martine. There are two things that you have to do.
1. Configure Subscriber to check your POP3 server address for bounced messages. You have to tell Subscriber where to look for these messages. The tutorial below will explain how to Configure Subscriber.
How to Process Opt-out Requests in GroupMail
2. Next, you will want to ensure that Outlook is configured to keep a copy of messages on your server. This way, GroupMail can find them there even after they are downloaded to your inbox. To do this, click on “Tools”, “Accounts” and you should find this setting in the Advanced tab.
You can also configure subscriber to automatically add or remove subscribes and unsubscribes.
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I hope that this helps.
Hi – I don[t use the scheduler as I just send out in real-time. I do not have any bounce history although the rules are set up. What should I do to capture the bounced emails before Outlook grabs them and brings them into my inbox? Do I keep a copy of all emails on the mail server and then what do I run from Groupmail? What is the stored procedure best used for? Thanks for you help – I am now so overwhelmed I need some help! Martine
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Hi Dick. There is no automated way to accomplish this task however GroupMail does create log files for every message sent.
After sending your message, go into your Sent Message folder and right-click on the message sent. Then, select “View Logs” and open the “Errors Log”. This file will contain a list of email addresses that failed each on a different line so it can be exported as a .txt file and then imported into GroupMail’s exclusion list or into another group to purge from the main group.
I hope this helps. I’ll publish a blog post today with screen shots for clarity.
The no sends that I want to elimenate are the ones that are denied in the process od sending. Not those that elicit a response later. they are two different instances. Alot are caused by spam filters. How do I get them to automatically be removed?
All my bounces comes in from “qmail-send program” so the from email address is irrelevant.
The from line says: MAILER-DAEMON@yyyyy.com.tw
Subject: failure notice
then the email starts like this:
—————
Hi. This is the qmail-send program at yyyyy.com.tw.
I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.
:
Sorry, I couldn’t find any host named xxxx.com. (#5.1.2)
———–
Is there a way to get the bounce rule to recognize the email address from the content? Or is this a problem with the email server?
Thanks,
Rick
Hey,
I’ve noticed several other people who have realized that the bounce management ISN’T removing bounced addresses from mailing lists as the “bounces” come from mailer-daemon and not the email address it was bounced from. This would seem to be necessary to have this function actually work and was wondering if you had any solutioins?
Thanks,
James
Excuse me, I cannot find the way to detect the hard and soft bounce. Do I need to set the account in “POP3 Email Account first”? Thanks
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Hi JP. You would want to configure Outlook Express to keep a copy of each message on the server so that Subscriber can find it.
You can create rules in Subscriber to recognize specific words in a subject line, From: Field or Body of messages. Subscriber comes with most standard return message subject lines pre-configured.
I am assuming that I cannot run Outlook Express prior to running this ad-on?
Also, can I use this to identify “remove” in the subject line?
Thanks,
JP
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