System Email Addresses

How many system email addresses are required?

Reply Focus needs a minimum of one email address for outgoing email messages and one for incoming email messages. There are no limits to how many you can use but lets consider where and why we might desire others. (For a summary version follow this mail servers link).

Incoming email messages

How can the autoresponder get incoming email messages? Autoresponder communications occur between;

The autoresponder and the mailing list which may or may not involve your web site (depends on how you choose to handle replies).
The web form and the autoresponder which always involves your web site.

a) Autoresponder and mailing list

When the autoresponder sends email messages to your mailing list members, some recipients might choose to reply. You can control how, or if, this happens:

If you don't want replies include in your out email a message indicating that replying to this email is useless as it is an auto generated message from an unmonitored address so no-one will read any replies.

If you want the replies to come via a web form direct the email recipients via a link in your out email to the required web form (set up specifically for this purpose). The autoresponder will receive an incoming email from the web form when a reply activates the web form.

You could allow replies direct from the email in which case there are two considerations. Every outgoing email must have a FROM address i.e. the senders address but in addition, with Reply Focus, you can request replies to be sent to a different email address i.e. each email can have a FROM address and a REPLY TO address. In the diagram below, the green lines indicate incoming emails to the autoresponder.

Whether the choice is one or two addresses, these email(s) are monitored regularly and ideally are similar to the email addresses you use for sending and receiving regular emails. The FROM address is what the recipient sees in their inbox FROM column. Whether to use a separate REPLY To address depends on the potential for volume. If you're likely to get a lot of replies its probably worth having a separate grouping for these replies under a different email address i.e. the REPLY To address.

b) Autoresponder and web forms

Someone on your web site fills out the web form and clicks SUBMIT. The script handles the transfer of this data from the web form to the autoresponder by sending the autoresponder an email using the Email address of recipient (set up in Setup Campaigns/Drivers/Incoming email).

c) Incoming emails from bounces

Whenever an email is sent, be it from the web form to the autoresponder or the autoresponder to the mailing list, the email is either delivered successfully or delivery fails for some reason. In the event of failure the email bounces and a failure message is sent to the sender so an additional way for autoresponders to receive incoming email is in the form of BOUNCE messages.

Bounces are an inevitable part of email communication. One advantage of a private autoresponder as apposed to an autoresponder service is that you control how these bounces are handled. This is obviously influenced by the nature of the bounce. Soft bounces are usually temporary in nature and generally easily remedied. Hard bounces are far more serious and require immediate attention.

Autoresponder to mailing list bounces

One would expect bounces from outgoing autoresponder emails to mailing lists because people are forever changing addresses or their mailbox might be temporarily full etc. The question is what do you want the autoresponder to do with these messages? Do you want the autoresponder to process the bounces or a human to monitor these bounces. Either way, without a REPLY TO address, the bounce message will go to the FROM address. If you are using a REPLY TO address it depends on the ISP as to which of the two addresses is used for the bounces.

Say for example your email address for regular correspondence is jack@mydomain.com. For all your regular emails that is the FROM address you would use. If you were to use jack@mydomain.com as the FROM address for your autoresponder emails and your ISP sends bounce messages to the FROM address then jack will get all the bounces. If you'd rather separate bounces from regular emails (will make life easier), use a variation for autoresponder emails - maybe jackb@mydomain.com for the FROM address and jbiggs@mydomain.com for the REPLY TO address. That way Jack still gets to monitor the bounces but in a more organized fashion.

Remember that an autoresponder cannot read incoming messages at an email address unless it knows what mail server to use to access the incoming emails. Therefore if you want the autoresponder to process the bounces you will need to set up the mail server for each incoming email address used by the autoresponder. If humans are to monitor the bounces i.e. it is bypassing the autoresponder then all you need is the email address (e.g. jack@mydomain.com or jbiggs@mydomain.com) without the mail server.

With Reply Focus you determine how many automatic resends to allow. The recommended approach is to set this number to 1 (Miscellaneous menu / Defaults / Other -- Max no of failed deliveries). This way the autoresponder will temporarily suspend mailing to any problem address until you manually override it, giving you the chance to monitor the failure and take appropriate action. Luckily you're in charge - its your decision whether to persevere or dump the contact. If it's a temporary or soft bounce there is a good chance that resending the message will have a successful outcome. However a hard bounce indicates that the domain doesn't exist or the specific recipient at that domain doesn't exist. In this case either the host or the recipient is unknown which makes the email address invalid and resending is not an option until the problem is rectified

Web form to autoresponder bounces

Your web form will always be sending to an email address you have set up so it will always be valid. In the unlikely event that your email address becomes invalid you can set up a bounced email in the script to receive the warning. A bounce message of this nature would require your immediate attention so use a regular non autoresponder email address that is constantly monitored.

Outgoing email messages

For normal autoresponder operations using your ISP for sending emails there is no reason to set up more than a single email address (FROM address) and mail server. This FROM address is set up (Setup / Send from-emails/... Can be used for incoming emails ) to handle both outgoing and incoming messages.