Monitoring bounced campaign emails
When an email cannot be delivered successfully, an automatic reply informing about the problem is returned (bounced) back to the sender. Tracking bounced emails allows the system to identify addresses that do not correctly receive campaign emails. Removing invalid addresses from your mailing lists saves bandwidth and improves the accuracy of your subscription statistics, leading to a better delivery rate.
After you enable and correctly configure bounced email monitoring, the system periodically checks the mailbox where the bounced emails are stored. All contained emails are analyzed and the bounce counter of subscribers is increased as needed. After a bounced email is processed, it is deleted from the mailbox. This functionality is ensured by the Check bounced emails scheduled task, which runs once per hour by default.
If the number of bounces counted for a subscriber reaches a certain limit, the system automatically blocks the corresponding address from receiving any further campaign emails.
Configuring bounced email monitoring
Open the Settings application and navigate to On-line marketing.
Ensure that the Enable on-line marketing setting is enabled for your website.
Select the On-line marketing -> Email marketing category of the settings.
Enable Monitor bounced emails.
Set up the other settings in the Bounced emails and POP3 settings sections. Contact your IT department if you need information on how to configure some of the settings in your business.
Bounced emails
Bounced email address
The address to which bounced emails are sent when the delivery of a campaign email to a subscriber fails. If set, this address is used in the From field of campaign emails.
Bounced email limit
Sets the amount of bounced emails that can be counted for a subscriber before the system blocks them from receiving further campaign emails. This limit is set for all email campaigns under the selected site.
If you enter 0, the system never blocks subscribers automatically. However, you can still view the bounced email count of subscribers in the Email marketing application.
Block subscribers globally
If checked, the system uses shared bounce counters for all subscribers that have the same email address. This is applied across all sites in the system.
Note: This setting does not ensure consistency between the bounce counts of all subscribers with a shared address, only that new bounces will be added to all of them.
This field is only available when defining global settings, i.e. when the (global) option is selected from the Site drop-down list.
POP3 settings
Server name
Sets the address of the mail server where the bounced emails are stored. POP3 is used to check the server and monitor bounced emails.
Server port
Specifies the number of the port used to connect to the mail server.
User name
Sets the user name used for authentication against the mail server.
Password
Sets the password used for authentication against the mail server.
Use SSL
Indicates whether the connection to the mail server should be secured using SSL.
Authentication method
Specifies the authentication method used for the connection to the mail server. Options include basic user name and password authentication and several challenge‑response mechanisms.
The Auto option uses APOP if supported by the server and plain text user name and password authentication otherwise.
Click Save.
Some mail servers may be configured to store emails even after they are downloaded, which causes the system to count bounces multiple times (every time the mailbox is checked). Please adjust the settings of the email server if you experience issues of this type.
Viewing the bounce count
You can view bounce statistics in various parts of the Email marketing application. The main Subscribers tab displays the amount of bounces associated with individual subscribers.
The same options are also available when viewing the subscribers of a specific campaign email in Email marketing -> edit () email campaign -> Subscribers. The bounce count of a subscriber is shared for all campaign emails on the given site.
Blocking and unblocking subscribers
Click Block () or Unblock () to manually change the blocked status of subscribers. When you unblock a subscriber, their bounce counter is reset to zero.
To perform these actions for individual subscribers assigned through a role or contact group, edit () the given role or contact group subscriber and switch to the Users or Contacts tab.
You can find blocked subscribers using the Blocked field in the filter above the list.
The Emails tab of email campaigns shows the total amount of bounces for each campaign email. This allows you to view the amount of sent emails and compare it with the number of bounces.
