Handle Bounces

[Professional and Corporate Editions Only]
When you send a message and the addressee cannot be found, the mail server will send you a notification that explains why the recipient address is undeliverable. We will refer to such notifications as bounces. People frequently change their email addresses and therefore it is very common for some addresses to become undeliverable. As a result, if you are sending mail to many recipients you should be ready to receive bounces.

If you send direct, AY Mail will be connecting to destination SMTP servers. In this circumstance, in most cases AY Mail will know right away if the address was undeliverable. Some of the addresses will not be distingushed as bad right away. For these, you will receive bounce notices later. If you use a single SMTP server, the server will not know if addresses are good or bad, so it will accept all the addresses. It will then send you bounces for every failed address. In this case you are expected to get many more bounces than if you were doing direct send, and automatic processing of bounces becomes critical. See Direct Sending vs SMTP for details.

In both cases, AY Mail can process bounces automatically through the AY Track server. To set up AY Mail for bounce processing you need to do the following:

1. If you have not done this before, you need to set up AY Track by clicking Settings->AY Track Setup Wizard from AY Mail main menu.

2. When you send a message, you need to make sure that you specified a correct sender address on the Message Tab. The bounces will be sent to this address, and therefore, it is very important that the email addressed to the sender address be delivered to your mail account (the one that processed by AY Track). Otherwise, you will not receive any bounces.

3. We recommend checking your email soon after you send your message. This will cause the AY Track server to download all the emails, and process the bounces if there were some of them sent to you. If you did large mailing and expect lots of bounces, you may need to check your email every 15 minutes or your mailbox may be overloaded and you will loose some of the bounces. While you are doing that, AY Track will be saving information on bounces.

You will receive most of the bounces very soon after you send the message, but some may take days to arrive.

4. Next time you open the AY Mail project that you have used to send the message, AY Mail will download all the information on bounces collected by AY Track. You can click on the Advanced tab and select Advanced->Check For Bounces/Notifications to check if there are any more bounces, but normally you do not need this, because AY Mail automatically downloads all the bounce information when you open the project and also when you watch delivery information on the Reports tab.

While AY Mail is downloading bounces from AY Track, you may see green checkmarks changing to red crosses for the recipients whose addresses happened to be undeliverable. The changes will be recorded in reports as well.

5. Do not delete the report created after you send the message. If you do, bounces will become unavailable. AY Track will still collect them, but AY Mail will not download bounces from AY Track if there is no report for the corresponding message.

Some of the server software applications use non-standard bounce format. AY Mail tries to recognize bounces created by common programs, but some bounces still will come undetected and you will receive them into your mailbox. You can then take actions manually.