CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,

I've recently helped a client do their first massing mailing using CiviMail and they have been really impressed by all the functionality that the module has. The bounce processing is working fine. However, I would like them to receive any manual (human-generated) replies to the mailing, which doesn't seem to be happening at the moment.

I've got the following setup:
A mailbox newsletter@example.org set up[/li][/list]

CiviMail is checking that mailbox 2x per hour via POP (IMAP doesn't work, unfortunately because our server doesn't support having subfolders of the inbox)

The mailing has the following settings:
From newsletter@example.org
Reply-to email    newsletter@example.org
Forward replies   On
Auto-respond to replies   Off
Open tracking   On
URL Click-through tracking   On

Verp is turned on and working (initially I was sending via sendmail rather than SMTP and this didn't work). So the from address I'm seeing on the emails sent out is newsletter@example.org and the reply-to address I see is newsletter+r.64.2860.97a7cfbc75231c05@example.org. With VERP working, the return-path line matches the reply-to line.

So far so good. The mailing went out and I was seeing both bounces and 'normal replies' in the newsletter@ mailbox. However, due to a configuration/permissions problem with civicrm/bin/CiviMailProcessor.php (which I will report as a bug/issue separately), that script was not running correctly. I have now fixed the problems with CiviMailProcessor.php, it's tallying up the bounces and the replies, but is clearing all messages out of the POP mailbox and depositing them into the various files/civicrm/custom directories.

Now, I want bounces cleared out of the mailbox, but I want other email to be left as is, or forwarded, or somehow sent to a human being. I think I need to set things up a bit differently for the next mailing in order to get this to work, maybe with the replyto address different from the From address and the return-path line. Is that right? Or am I missing something? Or do I really just need to set up CiviMailProcessor to use IMAP so that everything gets sorted but stays in the mailbox?

But more urgently, all the replies and bounces are now in the Drupal files directory of the web server. I don't care about the ones that were automatically recognised as bounces, but I would like to recover the others. It looks like they are just in Maildir format, so I can concatenate them all together and throw them into a mailbox. But which directory(s) do I want. I assume they are in some or all of the subfolders of the CiviMail.ignored folder (cur, new and  tmp). Is that right? Any pointers would be appreciated, as the client understandably wants to see all the real replies to their mailing.

Oh, and this is Civi 2.2.0.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Best wishes,
-Ian

Hi,
I was able to make a few changes to the IMAP handling so that it wasn't trying to create subfolders of the account inbox (which doesn't work with our version of dovecot). So, I have IMAP working, which is much nicer indeed. I may try to contribute a patch so that this ability to work with IMAP servers such as the one we have can be enjoyed by others.

However, in terms of email addresses and accounts, I am still slightly confused. I can sent up various email addresses to deliver to the email account which is then processed by CiviMail. But should the actual 'From' address on emails that are sent be set to something else (a person's personal email account)? My ideal would be for manual replies to the mailing to go to a human being's email account, but bounces and vacation messages should go to CiviMail to be processed and tallied. There are quite a few email accounts on the domain the site is using, so I'd rather not set up a catch-all address if I can help it.

Thanks,
-Ian