CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello -
  This is my first posting, so please be gentle.
  I have trying to get CiviCRM 4.3.5 bounce processing working for CiviMail mailings.  In the CiviMail Mail Accounts section, I set up two email addresses, one used for bounce handling (the default) and one used for Email-To-Activity, both using IMAP.  The domain for both accounts was set to xx.yy.gov, which is our Exchange mail domain.  The cron jobs for sending emails, bounce handling, and processing inbound emails all say "success" but there is nothing for them to process.  This is because the return-path goes to an unknown Exchange mailbox, see below.
  How do I get the return path to go to a specific address?  I did set the return-path for both CiviMail Mail Accounts, but they don't seem to be used.
  Any help would be appreciated.

To: <myemailaddr@xx.yy.gov>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
 boundary="=_830bb3ef7961a15c8aad38b6f08ad95b"
Reply-To: "Bud Smith" <Bud.Smith@xx.yy.gov>
Return-Path: b.2.1.d91c1d307cebf582@xx.yy.gov
From: "Bud Smith" <Bud.Smith@xx.yy.gov>
Subject: Take 1 July 12 Newsletter
List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:u.2.1.d91c1d307cebf582@xx.yy.gov>
To: <myemailaddr@xx.yy.gov>
Precedence: bulk
X-CiviMail-Bounce: b.2.1.d91c1d307cebf582@xx.yy.gov

Hi,

To be able to find who bounces (something not trivial if the recipient has aliases and forwarded emails), we send each email with a different sender (VERP) so when it comes back, we know to whom we sent it.

The usual trick is to use a single mailbox (say bounce@xx.yy.gov) and + notation: Most mail servers are sending yourmail+whatever@example.org to the yourmail@example.org mailbox, so if you configure bounce+ as the prefix, the mail will be sent as bounce+u.2.1.d91c1d307cebf582@xx.yy.gov and end up in the bounce mailbox.

Unfortunately, exchange is the only big mail server that doesn't handle the + notation. Assuming you can't switch to a better one, you have several options:

- have a catchall mailbox (the hershel way)
- use a separate domain to handle the bounces (I often use google apps for that)
- improve civimail (code or sponsoring) to use an alternative way of identifying bounces

On the latest, I have added the needed information (u.2.1.d91c1d307cebf582) as an extra header in the mail sent by civimail, seems to be quite reliable (but not as much as VERP as some mail servers strip these extra headers when they bounce)

Good luck

X+

Thanks for the replies.  The catch-all mailbox will not work for us because we have to have recipient filtering turned on in Exchange.

We get way too many emails to have google or another outside org handle them.  I can set up subdomains in our org, but that would mean that each site would have its own server, and I'm hoping to keep this multi-site.

It appears the only solution is to:

• improve civimail (code or sponsoring) to use an alternative way of identifying bounces

Ugh.  I can't believe there isn't a better way!

I don't think so, unless I don't understand correctly.

All our mail (for all the different website subdomains under "myorg.gov") goes to the single subdomain "email.myorg.gov".  We get probably millions of emails every week.

I can set up subdomains but wouldn't that mean a single sendmail server for each subdomain?  We are trying to set up a multi-site Drupal/CiviCRM environment.

Is there something I missed?

Well OK!  I freely admit that I am no sendmail expert.   

So what you are saying is that I can set up subdomains pointing back to my multi-site Drupal/CiviCRM server, and have sendmail running on it such that it can separate the emails into different mailboxes based on subdomains?

And then the bounce processor job can read from the local mailbox to retrieve the bounces?

Thanks!  I missed that -s flag earlier.