We now send just a summary notification about any emails that bounced (email returned to sender). The summary contains a link to a full report. You can also find the last month’s-worth of reports in communications → sent email.
Contents
Background
Email providers often refuse to accept email sent to their customers for various reasons. When this happens, they send the email back along with some information as to why they rejected it, a bounce message. The reasons can be both quite vague and highly cryptic. Cameo receives these directly and categorises them. It quarantines failed email addresses so we won’t send to them again until you have resolved the problem. See Cameo’s guide to handling bounces.
We also send a notification which lists recent bounces, periodically and a couple of hours after a mailshot. (Two hours is long enough to catch most bounces, but some email can take several days to be returned.)
However, these notifications could be quite long. Also the detail included has led to some email providers of Cameo users routinely bouncing the notifications about the bounces! It is not clear why. The most likely explanation is that, to the email provider, the detail for the bounces look back-scatter replies from a spam mailshot. Apart from them not being spam, that is in effect what they are.
Therefore, we now send only a summary notification to let you know there are some problems.
Bounce reports
The new summary says which mailshot(s) the problems came from and how many of each kind of problem. It also includes a link to a full report with details for each bounce. That is quite like the previous notifications, but presents the details in a table. The report also includes the full text of the bounce messages; previously, the notification truncated them. Hopefully, this will now allow the information to reach everyone.
We store bounce reports as attachments. You can find a list of these at the end of communications → sent email. They appear like any other notifications, so you can preview, download, rename, delete and copy them.
We discard bounce reports after 30 days, so the collection of bounce reports doesn’t grow indefinitely.