Question:
How does Symphony calculate how many emails are bounced back when sending out a campaign email? The report in my office outlook is different to that in Symphony.
Answer:
When an email bounces, the (receiving) email server sends a bounce back email to the email server that sent that message (your email server; Outlook). There are 100s of different types of mail server software available and each one with different configured enforcements with regards to accepting an email or rejecting an email. These enforcements relate both to the content of emails and the sender of an email. For example some mail servers must "know" either the sender of an email, or its recipient, in order to safely transmit mail. Mail servers that do not enforce this requirement are called "open relays" and can be exploited by spammers to send out tons of spam.
The different types of mail servers can send the bounce back message email in different formats. Symphony monitors bounce back emails and pro-grammatically reads them and deciphers what campaign email was bounced and why. Because the bounce email messages are in different formats Symphony cannot decipher all the different types so there are some emails that bounce that do not get recorded. This is why your bounce back list in (sent from) your Outlook email server does not correlate with the Symphony email campaign server software.
Internet email transfer as a rule for all is recognised as an unconfirmed delivery protocol, so there is no guarantee that your email will land in mailbox of your intended user.
We are making every effort to continuously improve Symphony to be able to handle some more of the more regular bounce back email formats. It is also not possible to make open rates 100% accurate. Symphony uses two methods to determine if a user has opened an email.
- A tiny transparent image is placed on the email allowing symphony to record when the image is loaded on Symphony’s remote server.
- We track link clicks so we can mark an email as read if a user clicks on a link.
This means if a user opens an email and does not enable images and does not click on a link Symphony has no way of knowing if the email has been opened.
I hope this provides you with the information you require.
Kind regards
The Symphony Support Team
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