CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

A bulk mailing was recently successfully sent out (Civi 4.2.6 on Wordpress). The mailing was configured to track replies and forward them on. The mailing report indicates that there were 3 replies, but only one of these was forwarded. Looking at the detail of the three replies I can see that they are all in the 'INBOX/CiviMail/processed' mail folder of my bounce handling mail account, which indicates that CiviMail chose to process these 3 messages rather than ignore them.

Two of these messages are auto-reply 'out of office' messages, and these have not been forwarded on. The third was a genuine reply and was forwarded.

Two questions/comments arise from this behaviour:

1. Is this expected behaviour? In earlier versions I'm pretty sure that auto-replies and out of office messages were not processed but instead moved into the 'ignored' folder. (I've certainly got plenty of such messages in my 'ignored' folder and none in the 'processed' folder.) This indicates that CiviCRM has grown sufficiently 'intelligent' to spot the difference between a real reply and an 'out of office' type message. My client was confused and concerned by this, as while the report showed 3 replies, they had only actually received 1 in their inbox, so they were worried that potentially important messages had got lost somewhere.

2. It appears that the sole current benefit of tracking replies is so that the mailing report can show if there have been replies and if so from whom. However these replies do not appear to be stored as Activities, and so the only way the administrator can know what's going in detail is to correlate the tracked replies with the messages in the 'processed' mailbox. I would suggest that a more elegant approach would be to log these replies as Activities in the same way that outgoing emails can be logged and stored.

I'd be grateful if anyone can cast any light on this.

Thanks
Graham