Schoolcomms - intercepting bounces

[howartp]

Hi,

 

Currently when emails are sent out with Schoolcomms, any bounce messages come back to me.

 

Would it be possible for Schoolcomms to intercept these in some way and process each one into a name and/or CSV of the person.

 

When we send emails, we get a CSV of parents who haven't got email addresses, containing the students name. Then a few moments later we receive half a dozen emails from invalid/full mailboxes - we have to open the email, then the attached original mail to find the 'To' name (ie parents name), then look them up in SIMS and find which child(ren) they are the parent of - it would be great if Schoolcomms could somehow intercept them and calculate the student's name in much the same way we do.

 

Peter

[vikpaw]

But doesn't the received email have your "reply to" on it.?

 

They would have to be the middle man on all emails to do that.

 

Somebody must have invented a way to parse the bounces though.

[howartp]

It does, but to be honest I'd be happy changing the ReplyTo address to our Schoolcomms inbound address ([email protected]) and having Schoolcomms process it like it does with Attendance messages.

 

"If email is a bounce message, send details to . If email is a manual reply, auto-respond saying 'Please re-read your email which quite clearly tells you we won't read replies, then contact the person addressed at the bottom of the email'.

 

(Well, something like that)

 

Peter

[vikpaw]

I see what you mean.

You can't beat an auto-reply, but surely over time as you investigate your bouncers the number should be getting less and less.

[Ric_]

IIRC the bounce will go to the sender in the 'from' field of an email and replies (hitting reply in the email client) will go to the address in the 'reply-to' field. I don't know Schoolcomms so you may need to figure the exact config out yourself.

[tombry]

I don't get any bounces, but one of the first things I did when I took over Schoolcomms was clean up all of the data errors.

 

I'd suggest that if you turned off the option to have reply messages go to you (under manage users, then your user), the bounce would instead show up in the Inbox of Schoolcomms, which would tell you who the parent was.

 

Would force you to go through the inbox, but that's something I do anyways just to make sure anything that comes in gets to the people it needs to.

[Schoolcomms]

Then a few moments later we receive half a dozen emails from invalid/full mailboxes - we have to open the email, then the attached original mail to find the 'To' name (ie parents name), then look them up in SIMS and find which child(ren) they are the parent of - it would be great if Schoolcomms could somehow intercept them and calculate the student's name in much the same way we do.

 

I'm pleased to tell you there is already a report to do that. Management > Management Reports > Search for "Undeliverable"

 

 

This can be saved off as a CSV

 

You will see that there is a flag called "Emails still sent to this address". Basically if it fails once or twice we will keep sending, after it fails for a third time we consider the e-mail address invalid and we wont attempt to send (it then shows up in your data issues as a blocked address).

 

Hope that helps

[howartp]

I'm pleased to tell you there is already a report to do that. Management > Management Reports > Search for "Undeliverable"

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]22888[/ATTACH]

 

This can be saved off as a CSV

 

You will see that there is a flag called "Emails still sent to this address". Basically if it fails once or twice we will keep sending, after it fails for a third time we consider the e-mail address invalid and we wont attempt to send (it then shows up in your data issues as a blocked address).

 

Hope that helps

 

Doh, I knew that - at some point in the past.

 

Is it possible to add the Time to that report in the future; we often send out multiple emails per day so sometimes won't know which email needs a paper copy.

 

Peter

[Schoolcomms]

Doh, I knew that - at some point in the past.

 

Tell me about it - took us a while to remember as well!

 

Some other useful ones in this area:

- Failed SMS numbers

- Mobile text numbers that have failed 5 or more times (this actually now lists ones 3 or more times we think, basically those that are blocked and would show up on data issues)

- Email addresses that have bounced 5 or more times (this actually now lists ones 3 or more times we think, basically those that are blocked and would show up on data issues)

- Recipients who have tagged messages as SPAM