Bounce Handler Settings when You use your own SMTP server
I'm using my own dedicated server for SMTP and not sure how the bounce handler work. Is the only option to use one of the services in the drop-down menu? What are other folks doing for bounces?
Mark Palmer Bounce Handler purpose is to handle bounces from your mailing list messages.
Bounce handling is an essential feature offered by most Email Service Providers (ESPs) and mail-sending platforms to manage bounced emails effectively.
Note: if you are using AWS SES you can configure end point with FluentCRM for that process.
When you send messages in bulk to your subscribers some of those emails bounce back for many reasons:
- soft bounce - email is invalid, closed or blocked,
- hard bounce - email is temporarily undeliverable - recipients inbox is full or their email server is down.
Bounced email is an email that couldn't be delivered. Specifically, it's an explanation of delivery failure related to server or spam issues, whether they are permanent or temporary.
Its good practise to handle your mailing list clean so you can avoid SPAM (RBL) plus keep your emails deliverability and domain/IP reputation high rates. That is the main reason why you should take care of your bounces meaning to remove some bounced emails from your mailing list and/or investigate why the bounce happened.
When you have your bounce handler in place you can automatically manage the process of bouncing emails.
Bounce Handler can read your awaiting messages (queue) and parses those messages in an attempt to understand why the message has been bounced (looking for the error type) - parsed message will then be tested and some action can be taken. The usual action that is taken is to apply a score to the email address that has bounced the message. Once the score threshold is reached, the email address is unsubscribed from the mailing list.
So... One of the essential metrics to monitor after send a marketing email campaign is the bounce rate. Bounce rate is the number of bounced emails divided by the total total number of sent emails.
Bounce rate is directly related to the quality of your mailing list and your domain/mail warmup.
A low bounce rate is the sign of a clean confirmed opt-in list with active and engaged subscribers. A high bounce rate indicates problems with the list management and/or permission based list acquisition methods and/or inefficient mail warmup and/or domain reputation.
Clean mailing list should be generating bounce rates of between 2 to 3% - do your own research if needed.
If your list is regularly generating higher bounce rate it is important that you find out why and take steps to reduce the number of bounces reducing bounces otherwise your emails wont be delivered to your subscribers inboxes.
An email non-delivery comes to a few things building and monitoring strong email lists that will be less likely to bounce emails (don't forget about email warmup and maintanance) to begin with following some basics email best practices and automating tasks to flag and remove bad email addresses.
We use a Postal server for SMTP. Its bounce handler is compatible with FluentCRM (thanks, Shahjahan Jewel for adding it). https://fluentcrm.com/docs/bounce-handling-with-postal-server/
Thanks everyone. I guess the source of my confusion is that I'm able to use my own server for SMTP with FluentSMTP but I then have no way to handle bounces. It just seems like a huge oversight. My goal was to improve deliverability by using my own dedicated server for SMTP, but now I have no way to handle bounces unless I use one of the other services for SMTP. It negates my own custom server for sending mail. I opened a support ticket and they said they didn't have the option for custom IMAP handling for bounces.
Mark Palmer having own mail server can be challanging when it comes to deliverability, security and compliance and it is way cheaper to use managed email service etc. Even keeping own dedicated IPs for AWS SES can be challanging but I am pretty sure you know that already.
I've run Linux servers since the 90s and one of the reasons I purchased FluentCRM was because I could use and control my own mail server. I wasn't aware that bounce handling via IMAP or custom web hooks wasn't possible. I don't want to use AWS or any other service. My server is secure and meets all SPF, DMARC, and DKIM standards. It was the whole reason I chose FluentCRM. Otherwise, I could just outsource the whole thing to a platform like Active Campaign, Mail Chimp or any of the others. My only option, if I want to continue using my own mailserver, is to flag bounces by hand. I have thousands of email contacts...flagging bounces by hand wasn't what I was hoping for. My next step is to determine whether I can download all the bounces from Gmail and figure out an import option.
Mark Palmer Since you’re familiar with managing your own servers, I highly recommend setting up a Postal server as previously mentioned. https://github.com/postalserver
Karl Emil Nikka The problem I've been having is that I opted to go with Google Business/Gmail for my email platform years ago. My hope was that I'd be able to keep all of that email platform and be able to run email marketing on my server (SMTP and bounce handling) . Does Postal allow that kind of configuration?
Mark Palmer Yep. We use Proton Mail for all regular emails, and send marketing and transactional emails through Postal. We use two dedicated subdomains for marketing and transactional emails as recommended by Amazon SES’ best practices (we follow them even though we don’t use SES).
Karl Emil Nikka Ok, I've been trying to work with Amazon SES all day thinking I could get it working, but unless the email bounce routes through their network, it doesn't trigger the webhook so that was a waste of time. So then I'd have to mess with the return path and now it's almost 3am, so I've given up for the day.
I'll try postal tomorrow. I've got exim running right now and will probably just keep them both running and divide up the emails based on system (exim), transactional (postal) and put them on different ports. I'll put postal on "mail.domain.com" and leave exim on "server.domain.com" .. maybe setup a relay in exim to send mail through postal.
I'm hoping I'll have better luck tomorrow. Thanks for your help!
I am using smtp.com as my smtp provider, and support told me that there is no way to handle bounces with smtp providers not listed on their site... Its very disappointing. :(