After manually dealing with “undeliverable” messages sent by phpList since we first started using it in November 2017, which is a whole lot of me manually searching for email addresses and then deleting them from the system, I’d like to explore the Bounce Processing capabilities because it sounds like they can largely remove the “heavy lifting” that I’ve had to do manually up to this point.
Looking through the documentation (Bounce Management | phpList manual), it all makes sense and I think I’ve got it figured out (at least, on paper…time will tell how/if that translates to in-action use), but I have an ultra-basic question:
Part of the initial setup for it involves establishing a Return Path email address. Right now, since everything is manual, “undeliverable” emails are just sent to my email address (which is what I set for all of the various places where email address can be defined in the Config → Settings screen in the back-end)…
So do I need to have our IS guy set up a special account for me to use only for bounce processing in our Gmail-based system, or is the Return Path email address something that needs to be set up on our phpList server?
Like I said, it’s a super-simple question with a hopefully super-simple answer…
I would recommend having your IT guy set up an email that can be used as the FROM address for the newsletter and used to manage bounces. The bounce tracker will look at returned mails and remove them from the list (while ignoring any spam that will ultimately end up there). We also added access to this email account to the newsletter writing team (a part of marketing) so they could respond to manual replies from end users/readers. Hope that helps - Doug
This may end up being a non-starter for us…I was poking around within the phpList admin to see what all could be done with bounces, and at one point I clicked the “Process Bounces” button and was greeted with an error that says “IMAP is not included in your PHP installation, cannot continue”.
Ran that by our IS guy, who gave me a command line to try for installing the php-imap extension from the repo for our server’s version of Linux, but it came back saying it didn’t exist. Turns out that our server is using RedHat Enterprise Linux 8 which apparently doesn’t have php-imap in its official repositor (which is the only repository we can use, officially).
(I only half-understand all of this, so I can only take him at his word.)
Anyway, it appears that, without that, the bounce processing stuff can’t happen
(But if a workaround for that issue is found, then I have a question related to your original reply: Currently, the FROM address used for the newsletter is a separate Gmail account (our school has its own owu.edu domain through Google Apps for Education (or whatever they’re calling that now). But, in order for the bounce-processing stuff to happen, it needs a more direct access to the account, correct? The account would have to thus be set up on the server housing phpList, right? (so not a Gmail account, basically)
iMap is not required, just the default setting for handling bounces. You need to modify the bounce area in the config.php to have your settings for your mail server. Then, you can manually run the bounce process or set up a CRON job that will automatically handle it at a specified time each day.
Ah good to know. So the question that I posed at the end of my last post definitely applies, then:
Currently, the FROM address used for the newsletter is a separate Gmail account (our school has its own owu.edu domain through Google Apps for Education (or whatever they’re calling that now). But, in order for the bounce-processing stuff to happen, it needs a more direct access to the account, correct? The account would have to thus be set up on the server housing phpList, right? (so not a Gmail account, basically)
The php IMAP extension is needed, even though phplist uses the POP3 protocol to retrieve emails. The IMAP extension provides both protocols.
@dethompsOWU
I’m surprised that your linux distribution doesn’t include the IMAP extension. You can use the IMAP plugin instead, follow the “Find plugins” link on the Manage Plugins page to find it.
Interesting…been dealing with our website server timing out for some reason starting about an hour ago, so probably won’t have much time to look into this stuff until next week, but definitely good to know. Thanks!
Don’t know much about dealing with a server not supporting IMAP/POP, but… When I finally set up proper bounce processing in phpList, I pretty much kicked myself for not doing it earlier.
My approach was to create a new email address that would only receive bounces, which includes (bogus*) spam complaints from people mashing the “mark as spam” button. It’s only processed by phpList, I never look at it directly. I wanted people to be able to just hit “reply” to reply to me, and for those replies to go to my regular inbox. I personally find broken reply mechanisms (“this address is not monitored,” “do not hit reply,” etc.) irritating and didn’t want that for my subscribers. So, “reply” works for them, and bounces and (bogus!) spam complaints work for phpList.
Since the bounce address is a completely different inbox, accessed via POP, it can be anywhere. For branding consistency, I created it within a domain that would make sense to subscribers if they looked at email headers. (Unlikely, but…)
Happy to share more details if desired.
I’m still confused about whether I should delete bounces, so I don’t, but that’s another matter.
(* If people sign up for my list and can easily unsubscribe at any time, me sending them what they asked for is not spam. But that’s also another matter, lol.)
Lots of good info here. Unfortunately, my best-laid-plans of getting to work on this stuff this past week didn’t come to fruition…was too busy with other stuff, but I’ll definitely file this away for when I do get a chance to work on it
