Giving you control with Email Bounce Management

[Matt Finger]

Our May update brings Email Bounce Management to our Invision Community cloud platform. In this blog entry, I'll go over what it is, why it's important, and how you can use it when needed.

What is it?

For those who may not know, an email bounce occurs when an email message is sent and the recipient either doesn't exist (hard bounce) or they have blocked the sender (you!) in a spam complaint (soft bounce).

When an email message bounces we block that address at the cloud level so it cannot receive new messages from any community. This is considered good practice for email service providers, and ensures that we maintain a low bounce rate when sending emails on behalf of all the communities on our platform.

Please note this pertains to the Invision Community Cloud platform email service. If you use SMTP or SendGrid, email bounces are managed externally and may enforce different policies.

What Bounce Management Tools are we providing?

We're giving you the ability to see which members have blocked email addresses, and to unblock emails known to be safe.

Seeing which emails are blocked

In the AdminCP Members table (AdminCP > Members > Members), on cloud you will see a new filter: "Email Undeliverable". These are any member accounts that have emails blocked due to soft or hard bounces.

 

Additionally, on the front end, if a Member's email is blocked, they will see a warning indicator in the Nav/User Bar prompting them to change their email in their account settings.

 

Lifting Email Blocks

As stated earlier, when an email is blocked, it is blocked on the cloud platform level. If the block is not locked (which can happen if it's unblocked too many times), you will see a warning the Member's AdminCP Profile page.

 

Clicking into it you will see an option to unblock.

 

One final note on the Email Block Policy

If a situation occurs when an email is unblocked and gets blocked again a certain number of times, the block becomes permanent. In these cases, you will be able to see that the email is blocked but there won't be an option to unblock, and the member will have to change their email to resume receiving your Community's messages through us. This ensures that the Invision Community cloud platform retains a good email sending reputation.

Thanks for reading and as always stay tuned to for the latest and greatest upcoming features and insights!

The features discussed in this announcement are not available for Invision Community Classic. Click here to learn more about switching to our platform to get this and other benefits.

 

 

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[Randy Calvert]

This is great!  One suggestion however...  a user would not know they're being blocked unless the person happened to stumble into their email settings.  

In my experience, this is very unlikely to happen.  Users don't check there often (or at all).  They may not even realize there is a problem or realize email has not been seen by them in a while to know to investigate.  

Could you add some sort of front-end notification as well?  

The red stripe could literally just be the email settings page you linked above where you explain the problem and ask the user to update their email.  

[Olivia Clark]

Hey @Randy Calvert! Great suggestion!

I understand that we tried that with this project but had to remove it because it caused query overhead. It may return in future after more engineering.

[Day_]

Think I have 2 email addresses which are blocked as I would have been receiving emails whilst I was waiting for my DNS to update, I have sent a support ticket but it’s from one of the email addresses which is blocked, not sure if you will have it. Ooops.

[Jim M]

15 minutes ago, Day_ said:

Think I have 2 email addresses which are blocked as I would have been receiving emails whilst I was waiting for my DNS to update, I have sent a support ticket but it’s from one of the email addresses which is blocked, not sure if you will have it. Ooops.

I have removed these blocks for you now from our system 🙂 .

[Dll]

Are there any plans to build on this? The initial implementation is fine as a start point, but at the moment it's hard to do anything about it, if there are a reasonable number of members in the list.

It would be good to have a way to contact them all in bulk - maybe with an alert. Or if that's not possible, to be able to put them into a particular usergroup in bulk, so that then they could be contacted through the alerts system. 

Right now, you have to go through each one individually if you want to do anything proactive, which is quite painful. 

[Marc Stridgen]

You would be best to post up exactly what you would like to see within the feedback area, if you are looking for additions to how this is managed 🙂