Getting started
Installation & Setup
Video Tutorials
Administration
Audience Management
Email Marketing
When you send an email to an email address, if the recipient email address is invalid or has a problem such as technical issues, the email will be returned to the sender. Just like in the real world, when you send a mail to someone but if the recipient address is invalid or if that person doesn’t live on that address any more, the mail will be returned to you. It’s the same case with the bounce processing in email delivery.
There are tons of valuable information in “Deliverability” section about this topic but when it comes to successful email delivery, your “sender reputation” matters a lot. And your sender reputation is built based on many factors. Sending email to invalid email addresses and doing this repeatedly is one of the most effective way to ruin(!) your sender reputation.
Therefore, if you are looking for a way to build a long-lasting, consistent email marketing operation, you need to pay attention to bounce processing. Whenever a bounce (invalid email delivery) occurs, you must detect this and remove that recipient email address from your lists.
The short answer is; “you have collected email addresses without getting their permission to send emails”. The long answer is; you have a email list with poor quality. There might be out-of-date email addresses which do not exist any more, or email addresses which are idle for years but they have been turned into “spam traps” by ISP’s. Of you have an email list with no opt-in confirmation which has resulted your competitors and hackers to subscribe many invalid or spam trap emails to your email lists.
If you have high bounce rate and if you are not getting rid of those email addresses in your email lists, then you have a big problem. You will never be able to build a sustainable email delivery reputation. Your email marketing campaigns will suffer, you will get lower opens and clicks and most of your emails will either be rejected by recipient mail servers or your emails will end in the spam folder.
This diagram shows an example email delivery from your SMTP server to the recipient SMTP server and then possible ways of bounce reporting.
When you create and send an email campaign in Oempro, or an autoresponder is triggered and delivered to the subscriber, Oempro first renders the email according to RFC standards. Email headers, email body parts and other required parameters are rendered to make sure that the email is ready to be delivered to the recipient email address.
The next step is to delivery the rendered email to your SMTP email delivery server. Once it’s received by your SMTP server, it checks the recipient email address, finds the SMTP server of the recipient and performs a connection to the recipient SMTP server to deliver the email.
Bounce report can occur in two different ways:
There are two bounced email types:
The important thing here is, you should immediately stop sending to hard bounces but continue sending to soft bounces. Oempro has capability to identify hard bounces and perform bounce processing only for hard bounced email addresses.
Both sync and async bounces must be processed and those related recipient email addresses must be removed from your subscriber lists. Otherwise, you will continue sending emails to these recipients and consistent delivery attempts to invalid email addresses will damage your email delivery reputation quickly.
In this section, we will cover both async and sync bounce processing setup.