Required settings for email bounce processing
An explanation of the 'from' and 'reply to' email address fields in the 'addressing' tab, and configuring your populus site to process soft and hard bounces.
When you configure an email send you need to specify two email addresses on the Emailer admin page “Addressing” tab:
- "From email" address is the email address that the email is sent from and will appear at the top of the email that the recipient receives.
- The "Reply-To" email address is the email address that is used when your email recipients hit "reply" to your messages but doesn't appear anywhere on the email message.
Bounce Processing
The 'from' email address you specify is important because all automated mail server responses (things like 'permanent failure', 'mailbox full', temporary failure') are sent to this address. The populus system uses these responses to (1) report on 'hard' and 'soft' bounces; and (2) to clean the email list.
However, in order for the populus emailer to be able to process these responses it must actually receive them. There are two ways to do this:
- You create the 'from' email address and designate the populus server as the recipient server for those emails. This means that any emails to that email address will be automatically be sent to the populus server. For this reason it is best to have it as something like 'noreply@company.com.au' so that no one sends any emails that require a response.
- You specify the 'from' email address as an email address that will be processed by your mail server, but you set up an automated forward of all emails received to the populus server by forwarding the email to "noreply@cobaltmedia.com.au".
An option to download the statistics report is available where the user can view the email addresses that have send failures reported.
- Temporary failures represent either network delays or full mail inboxes.
- Permanent failures are "email addresses not found and undeliverable". (It is recommended to download the send report and review these permanent failure email addresses for typos and update the member record)
The populus membership system will automatically remove the member from the opt-in list after 3 permanent delivery failures.
Note: the 'unsubscribe' function only marks member records that are stored in the member database for emails which are sent to an opt-in mailing list. For emails which are being sent to uploaded CSV files - you will need to remember to look on the send statistics report for any records indicated as 'unsubscribe' and manually remove them from your offline email data lists.
