"Unknown bounce type: Could not parse bounce email"

[manolem]

Hi

In previous versions of Civirm I had the following problem:

While I had confihured the email properly (i.e. any test emails submitted by Civicrm have been sent ok) I was unable to send a bulk-email, via Civimail, to a group containing only one recipeient, the one that I had sent the successful email previously.

I did not use Civirm due to that. When I saw the new version 3 I hoped that the problem is solved, so I installed Civicrm 3 under Joomla 1.5 with the same results "Unknown bounce type: Could not parse bounce email"

Could you help?

Regards

manolem

[Piotr Szotkowski]

Can you send to other recipients? I.e., is the problem with that particular recipient, or, in general, bulk email sending?

[Donald Lobo]

also, can you check your mail logs and see the more specific mailer error

lobo

[leupi]

I am having much the same issue. I have tried to send to various email addresses but everything seems to bounce with the same error:

Unknown bounce type: Could not parse bounce email

I am currently trying to gain access to our Mail Logs, I assume that that is something on our Mail Server and not within CiviCRM itself? Is there anything specific that I should be looking for? I've never parsed though mail logs before so I really don't know what to look for. In the meantime, is there anything else that I might be able to take a look at?

Thanks

[Piotr Szotkowski]

The mail logs should say why the bounce happened (and whether it happened on the recipients’ ends or – more probably – right at the outgoing server that CiviCRM tries to talk to). In most cases the outgoing server does not like CiviMail’s MAIL FROM headers (which differ on every email by default, as they are used to track SMTP-level bounces).

Lacking access to the mail logs, you might try looking into the mail account related to the webserver user; maybe the bounces are registered there as messages and contain some clues.

[emilyf]

I got bounces on 30 out of 32 emails I sent out via CiviMail. 30 of the contacts were email address only contacts -- no names. The 2 that received it had names associated with the contacts. Is this the correct behavior? Does Civi not support mailing out to email address only contacts? Is there a way to override it?

[Donald Lobo]

what specific version?

there were some issues related to this with earlier 3.0 / 3.1 series. we believe this has been fixed in 3.1.4

lobo

[emilyf]

version 3.0.4...was the fix backported by chance? not sure i can upgrade this particular instance just yet....or a patch?

[rdoiron]

I'm getting this error too and am trying to figure out if the problem is with civimail, civismtp or both.  We have a mailing list of 19,000 names and the first time we tried to do a bulk mailing we had a bounce rate of 76%.  We then signed up for civismtp and tried again and got a bounce rate of 52%.  The mailing report doesn't yield many clues. Some messages to yahoo.com and gmail.com domains bounce while others don't.  We're using drupal 6 and civicrm 3.1.1 

Thanks for any help you can offer. We're a small nonprofit and our mailing list is our lifeline. 

[Kiran Jagtap]

Hello,

To integrate patch for v3.0, you required to make changes in two files, namely :
1. CRM/Utils/Mail.php
2. CRM/Utils/Mail/FixedMailMIME.php

1. Patch for CRM/Utils/Mail.php
go to line around 94 or so ( ie after line $headers =& $msg->headers($headers); )
insert below code :

Code: [Select]

        $to = array( $headers['To'] );
        //get emails from headers, since these are
        //combination of name and email addresses.
        if ( $cc = CRM_Utils_Array::value( 'Cc', $headers ) ) {
            $to[] = $cc;
        }
        if ( $bcc = CRM_Utils_Array::value( 'Bcc', $headers ) ) {
            $to[] = $bcc;
            unset( $headers['Bcc'] );
        }
 
and on line 58 ( ie after line : $headers['Cc']  = $cc; ) paste below line to handle bcc

Code: [Select]

$headers['Bcc']  = $bcc;

2. CRM/Utils/Mail/FixedMailMIME.php

There are lot of changes to this file, so better would be, download file from v3.1 and replaced w/ your install
( http://svn.civicrm.org/civicrm/branches/v3.1/CRM/Utils/Mail/FixedMailMIME.php )

Caveat : Make sure to get backup of your code files.

Hope this help

kiran

[emilyf]

I upgraded to 3.1.5 and I'm still having this problem. Odd things are happening. It sends out exactly 31 emails successfully and the bounces are processed correctly and come to my gmail IMAP box.

As soon as it tries to send to more than 31 people, all the rest give the 'Unknown bounce type: Could not parse bounce email' error. None of those bounces even show up in my bounce box, so it seems like they might not even be going out. Ideas on how to debug?

[xavier]

Can you see the log of your MTA ?

If you are on a low cost hosting, might be that your server does block sendings as soon as you got 32 per second, or whatever limitation they impose on your site.

X+

[xcf33]

This happened to us a couple of times,

The latest time after we have migrated our Drupal 6.16/CiviCRM 3.14 installation from one domain to another, around 50% of our emails came back with this error. (24,000 out of 50,000)

Interesting thing is, these failed emails were never injected into our SMTP server. There were no trace of a bounce message from our SMTP server to the email handler so this bounce is returned probably during the connection process between CiviCRM and the SMTP server.

Our mailer settings are as follows:

Mailer Spool Period 180
Mailer Batch Limit 0
Mailer Spool Limit 0

[Piotr Szotkowski]

The latest time after we have migrated our Drupal 6.16/CiviCRM 3.14 installation from one domain to another, around 50% of our emails came back with this error. (24,000 out of 50,000)

IIRC, CiviCRM 3.1.4 (and previous) had known bugs with regards to a-bit-too-restrictive header validation (emails not being sent to recipients with letters outside [a-zA-Z] and/or emails not being sent to recipients without a name).

Interesting thing is, these failed emails were never injected into our SMTP server. There were no trace of a bounce message from our SMTP server to the email handler so this bounce is returned probably during the connection process between CiviCRM and the SMTP server.

That would be it; the emails in question were considered invalid by the (buggy) PEAR mailing library we use. See CRM/Utils/Mail/FixedMailMIME.php for the gory details.

[xcf33]

IIRC, CiviCRM 3.1.4 (and previous) had known bugs with regards to a-bit-too-restrictive header validation (emails not being sent to recipients with letters outside [a-zA-Z] and/or emails not being sent to recipients without a name).

That would be it; the emails in question were considered invalid by the (buggy) PEAR mailing library we use. See CRM/Utils/Mail/FixedMailMIME.php for the gory details.

Hi Piotr,

My question would be the follows:

1. This case I described did not happen to us in previous cases, this was the only time. (Very isolated) As matter of fact, I did another mailing this afternoon with the same 50,000 emails and they were all injected fine.

It makes me wonder if it had anything to do with MySQL connection issues (MySQL server gone away or etc) or script time out issues. However, those were not shown in my php logs. Also we had sent 5 or 6 mailings to this email groups before (sent successfully) so I would think that our SMTP server does not dislike the CiviCRM email headers and the mailing logic were fine?

Can what you described happen on some occasions but not others?

2. It would be a nice feature if CiviCRM can create some kind of log of those error emails due to the PEAR mailing library or even just create some sort of action available in the mailing report so you can add all the unknown bounce type error into a group, remove their hold and resend the emails?

What are some other options we can use to debug/trace this error?



i will update to CiviCRM 3.15 and let you know if this continue to persist.


Thanks,


Chang