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Forward Email Bounces to the Right Person
Idea shared by J Lee - 4/3/2021 at 1:10 PM
Proposed
Hi 
We have an app that sends email notices to users. A few years back, we used to send the notices from the user's email, so when a bounce happened, the bounce would go to the user's email address, but as everyone knows, this can't be done successfully anymore because of spam regulations. 

So now we send all email notices from the same email address. info@domain.com. We get these bounces and currently have to forward them to the correct user—a slow and inefficient process. 

I don't know if anyone else does app development in the Smartermail community, but if you do, you have probably run into this same problem.

A long time ago, we used Argo Soft,  which would allow us to dump emails into a folder, run a custom script to scan the email for addresses, and then forward the email using mail.php. But this was an inaccurate way and had forward mistakes. 

I'm looking for a new feature for Smartermail that would basically look at one email account's inbox/folder. It would forward the emails to a selection of TO email addresses, FROM email addresses, CC email addresses, or both or all listed in the raw HTML file, except for the original bounced email. 

A step better would be to scan the email for bounce codes and allow the insertion of default text explaining the reason for the bounce to the end-user, so they know how to fix the bounce problem. 

If anyone knows of a 3rd party app that does this, let me know, but I have been unable to find it. 


J. Sebastian Lee Service2Client LLC 6333 E Mockingbird Ste 147 Dallas, TX 75214 - 877.251.3273

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It is hard to understand what you are trying to do.    If you get a bounce from user@example.com, where is the bounce supposed to go?    It reads as if you want to send the bounce to the same address, user@example.com. This cannot be what you mean because the bounce message will bounce for the same reason as the original.

I will assume that these are messages from your website and that the user logs into your website using their personal email address, and that you want the bounce to go to their web account.  In this case, you should try using VERP encoding, such as info+example.com=user@domain.com.  Then the bounce still goes to the info@example.com mailbox, but an API can be used to retrieve the message and update the website account using the recipient information encoded in the bounced address.   

The user portion of an email address is limited by RFC to 64 characters, so there is always the chance that the expanded address will be too big.   But this type of format is used widely in the industry, usually without problems.  Additionally, not every system will enforce the 64-character limit, so you may be able to bend the rule without difficulty. 

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