The Messaging Times

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.