CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I recently sent a mailing (800 messages).  120 were a success and the rest reported a bounce with this Bounce Reason:

"Unknown bounce type: Could not parse bounce email"

The problem was that the hosting provider (bluehost.com) only allows 150 messages to be sent per hour.  At that point, sendmail will reject the message.

Right. Note that you can go to Administer → Administration Console → CiviMail → Mailer Settings and set the ‘Mailer Batch Limit’ to 150 there and the ‘Mailer Spool Period’ to 3600 (seconds). Of course, it might be better for you to set the former to 15 and the latter to 360 (or any other combination).

Alas, this vauge bounce reason really meant "sendmail is rejecting your message" - which answers a question I've had for a while: will CiviMail report a "bounce" even though it was a problem with getting the mail off the server in the first place?  The answer seems to be yes.

Yes, in this case CiviMail will consider this a ‘hard’ bounce – i.e., a bounce right there on the SMTP level. We use packages/Mail/smtp.php to send CiviMail emails via SMTP – but I’m not sure the error codes returned from there allow us to distinguish between a hard bounce of ‘the localhost server does not allow more emails’ and a hard bounce of ‘the localhost server accepted the email but returned outright that the addressee’s server won’t even receive the email’.

Of course, if you can offer a patch to make it better (or at least have an idea how to make it more intelligent), we’re all ears.

I am using sendmail for this site, does that still use packages/Mail/smtp.php?

CRM_Core_Config uses Mail::factory to fetch the right mailer, and I think in your case it yields the one from packages/Mail/sendmail.php.