Coming Soon: Email Bounce Management

[Charles]

On our cloud platform, we handle email for you. To ensure email deliverability we have to keep our "score" high which means we are very strict about managing email sending.

Right now, our systems monitor when an email bounces or is reported as spam. For spam reports we immediately stop sending to that email to ensure a good sending score. For bounces, it depends on the type of bounce but they will eventually be blocked as well.

This is great for sending scores but sometimes emails get blocked when they should not. People might accidentally click mark as spam. Their email provider might be having technical problems one day causing bounces that then get resolve. The list goes on.

Bounce Management

We are adding the ability for you to view reports on bounced/complaint emails, take action on member accounts (purge them or mark them as no notifications), and unblock emails that our platform may be refusing to email.

A few notes on unblocking: we have to impose some limits of course. Spam complaint blocks can only be unblocked one time. If a second spam complaint for same email address comes in then no further sending will happen (ever). Bounce emails can be unblocked five times.

A further note on spam complaint emails: depending on the nature of the complaint, they may not be able to be unblocked. Sometimes a spam complaint comes in and is targeted to the source (your community) and other times is targeted to the platform (our entire infrastructure). If it's targeted at our systems globally, then you would not be able to unblock it. But then, who wants to keep emailing someone who marks you as spam anyway!

 

This new feature will be available on all of our packages except Beginner.

[Dll]

Is there any plan to allow custom email addresses to be used as the sender from the cloud system?

[Charles]

On 2/22/2023 at 2:43 AM, Dll said:

Is there any plan to allow custom email addresses to be used as the sender from the cloud system?

Do you mean the "From" address? Right now they are all from noreply@invisioncloudcommunity.com but the "on behalf of" address is your address.

We can look into it but the problem is the return path. We have to ensure that bounce/spam reports come back to us for processing.

[Randy Calvert]

The only way to make this work if you're using your domain for mail today (meaning like Office 365, Google, or some VPS running mail) is to use multiple mail servers.  

So you might have me@mydomain.com, noreply@mydomain.com, etc all pointing to mx.mydomain.com (Google for example).  That stays as-is so as not to disrupt existing mail.  Anything related to the IPB community could be noreply@SOMETHING.mydomain.com.  Basically a vanity address pointing to something controlled by IPS.  something.mydomain.com could point to a mail server that is controlled by IPS that could receive the bounces and maybe even forward inbound to me@mydomain.com.  Or instead of forwarding inbound email, possibly pipe it into Commerce into a ticket queue.  

[Charles]

You can also set a proper return path in the header but ancient email providers or corps still running Outlook 1999 may not honor it 🙂 

[Dll]

3 hours ago, Charles said:

Do you mean the "From" address? Right now they are all from noreply@invisioncloudcommunity.com but the "on behalf of" address is your address.

We can look into it but the problem is the return path. We have to ensure that bounce/spam reports come back to us for processing.

Thanks, can I ask if you know of many communities who are using the built in email service and whether they've had any issues or voiced concerns in terms of branding and recognition of where the emails are from etc? From a technical and cost perspective it seems like a no brainer, the concern for us would be that the email isn't coming from our domain. 

[Randy Calvert]

1 hour ago, Dll said:

Thanks, can I ask if you know of many communities who are using the built in email service and whether they've had any issues or voiced concerns in terms of branding and recognition of where the emails are from etc? From a technical and cost perspective it seems like a no brainer, the concern for us would be that the email isn't coming from our domain. 

What I PERSONALLY have in place is use my own SMTP provider.  I chose to use AWS SES.  Since IPB is using the AWS platform, it qualifies for their free tier, which is 62K outbound emails per month.  (Additional emails are $0.10 per 1K email).  My site sends about 15K emails per month, so I have no problem staying within the free tier.

This has allowed me to have outbound sent from my own domain entirely.  BUT...  this means that IPB won't be able to handle bounces etc.  It means I have to manage getting out of the SES sandbox, reputation, etc.  

(I was doing this before I moved my site to being cloud hosted.  Once I moved to cloud, I just kept my existing already setup mail setup.)

Edited February 23, 2023 by Randy Calvert

[Dll]

13 hours ago, Randy Calvert said:

What I PERSONALLY have in place is use my own SMTP provider.  I chose to use AWS SES.  Since IPB is using the AWS platform, it qualifies for their free tier, which is 62K outbound emails per month.  (Additional emails are $0.10 per 1K email).  My site sends about 15K emails per month, so I have no problem staying within the free tier.

This has allowed me to have outbound sent from my own domain entirely.  BUT...  this means that IPB won't be able to handle bounces etc.  It means I have to manage getting out of the SES sandbox, reputation, etc.  

(I was doing this before I moved my site to being cloud hosted.  Once I moved to cloud, I just kept my existing already setup mail setup.)

We also currently use AWS, but send more so aren't within any free tiers. Although it's not expensive, I'm a great believer in not spending money on something you don't have to, so if there's another way I'm open to it!

 

[Charles]

Nearly all use our email sending. I think you two are outliers 🙂

[Dll]

Wow, ok. Maybe we ought to consider switching over then. 

[Charles]

It's included in your service 🙂 

[Randy Calvert]

@Charles... where do you plan to have this management done?  Is this going to be in the Client Area or from within the ACP?  

[Charles]

1 minute ago, Randy Calvert said:

@Charles... where do you plan to have this management done?  Is this going to be in the Client Area or from within the ACP?  

ACP and front end.

 

[Randy Calvert]

Awesome!  Thanks!  

[Randy Calvert]

Last week, I migrated my community from using SES to using CiC for outbound email.  So far, it's been a pretty smooth transition.  The only thing I "miss" and wish would be available is email tracking.  

There are times someone says we did not get an email from us and I will go pull the logs to show that the email was not only delivered, but also opened by them.  

Overall though, this is one last thing I need to worry about going forward so I'm thrilled with the simplification.

[Charles]

This new feature is now complete and will be in our May release. It will also be available on all Cloud plans. The previous post excluded the Beginner plan.

Expect a blog entry soon with details. In the meantime, if you have questions @Matt Finger can answer. 

[Randy Calvert]

Woot!  Congrats!

What's the user experience like if a user's email is triggered?  Is it an alert style message?  Are they just dropped back into the validating group?  

Does it actually just change all their preferences to no mail delivery or leave it, but a flag overrides the ability to trigger mail being sent?

Edited March 23, 2023 by Randy Calvert

[Matt Finger]

@Randy Calvert In this first go, the non-admin UI is minimal. It's just the nag Charles showed above, and yeah behind the scenes it will catch any email from being sent to them.

The Admins will be able to filter via the ACP to view all members with blocked emails

Additionally, these block records are saved so no one can use that email in the future (new accounts or existing) while it's blocked.

[Randy Calvert]

Understood!  

That screenshot is EXACTLY where I was hoping that report would be!  It makes complete sense for it to be there and gives us the ability to apply other filters such as non-deliverable in a specific member group, or last activity date.  So that's very helpful!

If I might make a suggestion for a subsequent iteration...  users RARELY go into their account settings.  In fact, they may never even notice they're no longer getting email from us at all.  

It would be very helpful to have a way of more prominently notifying a user of the problem.  I would suggest displaying a message similar to the announcements feature's "above page content" or at the very top of the page.

You could display a red bar that has a warning that there is a problem with email delivery.  At that point you can simply drop them on that revised page to update their email address.

If emails are not being received, they can no longer self-service reset passwords, they may miss important announcements, etc.  So it's important they're aware of that issue ASAP.  I personally suggest it would always display until the issue is resolved and not allow it to be dismissed by the member.  

[Como]

On 3/24/2023 at 3:45 AM, Randy Calvert said:

If I might make a suggestion for a subsequent iteration...  users RARELY go into their account settings.  In fact, they may never even notice they're no longer getting email from us at all.  

It would be very helpful to have a way of more prominently notifying a user of the problem.  I would suggest displaying a message similar to the announcements feature's "above page content" or at the very top of the page.

You could display a red bar that has a warning that there is a problem with email delivery.  At that point you can simply drop them on that revised page to update their email address.

If emails are not being received, they can no longer self-service reset passwords, they may miss important announcements, etc.  So it's important they're aware of that issue ASAP.  I personally suggest it would always display until the issue is resolved and not allow it to be dismissed by the member.  

I too would like to see this addition.