How Does Bounce Processing Work?

When sending your email campaigns there should always be a "Bounce" email address setup. Bounce addresses are associated to a Mailing List and as such can be found by using the "Edit" link beside a Mailing List.

Your bounce email address is an email account on your server that you need to create. eg. bounce@mydomain.com. All bounced emails from your campaigns will go to this address and they will remain in this account until you delete them manually or you process bounces.

When processing bounces WebPal EMS logs into this email account and essentially reads each bounced email and using a set of rules built into the application will determine whether or not it's a soft bounce, a hard bounce or a non-recognized bounce.

• Soft Bounce - is a temporary bounce such as "This user's mailbox is full."
• Hard Bounce -  is a permanent bounce such as: "This email account does not exist."

If it's a soft bounce, WebPal EMS will record the bounce but will take no action on the email address until it soft bounces 5 times. Once an email address has soft bounced 5 times, it is treated as a bounced email.

A hard bounce is processed as a bounced email right away.

A bounced email is never deleted, instead it is marked as "Bounced" and future emails will not be sent to this email address.

How do I Process Bounced Emails?

We always recommend that you setup your bounce details in your mailing lists themselves. This prevents you having to remember these details each time you wish to process bounces. To set this up simply select the desired list from the "mailing lists" page and click on the "edit" link to the far right. Once here, follow the steps below.

• Bounce Email Server Name: Mail server that your bounced emails are stored on. (eg. mail.mydomain.com)

• Bounce Email User Name: User name of the account you are using for bounced emails. This can be either in the format ‘username’ or ‘username@domain.com’ depending on your host.

• Bounce Email Password: The password that is associated with the user name above.

• IMAP Email Account: Select this option if your bounce email server is an IMAP server. If it is not an IMAP server it will be a POP3 server.

• Use extra mail settings: You may need to set extra options to connect to an account if you receive an error on testing. (Click the "Test Bounce Settings" button.)

• Extra Mail Settings: This will be hidden until the option above is selected. Add any options that may be needed to connect to a bounce account. E.g. /notls and /nossl See this article for more information.

Once complete you can go to "Process Bounced Emails" in the "Mailing List" menu. This step will ask you to confirm your bounce details that you have stored in the create mailing list step or, if you haven't entered any in it will ask you to do so.

Next you need to click the button 'Start Processing'. This will start WebPal EMS processing all the bounced emails and changing the status of the subscribers accordingly. When this is completed you will be notified as to how many hard, soft and unknown bounced emails the application has found.