Forum Discussion

octavian_krody's avatar
octavian_krody
Guide
2 years ago

Email bounce handling on Khoros communities

Hello and a Happy New Year!

1.

Does Khoros by default "from: mailer@eu.khoros-mail.com" apply bounce logic to notifications sent by the community?
Inspecting the email sources I can see Variable envelope return path (VERP) being setup, so my assumption for this is yes,
but how can we tell from an API if the user has a valid email address?

2.

Upon changing the default "from" to "community@notifications.mydomain.com" the return path no longer is what it was,
instead it is the same as the from address, meaning I should be somehow responsible for dealing with bounces, is this assumption correct?

3.

Is there a recommended approach on how to tell what emails coming to that address are bounced mails?
How to tell which target email has bounced and what type it was?
Searching the internet didn't provide much in terms of SDKs (we cannot use 3rd party providers like zerobounce / mailchimp etc)

4.

How would I notify Khoros through the api to have feature parity, for detected bounces?

Trying to investigate this myself, I found the following.

Searching for user by email:

  • v2 does not have this feature
  • v1 returns 1 account for an email even though multiple exist (contradicting uniqueness described at rest v1 docs )

Updating user email verified status:

  • neither allows setting the status
  • v2 is read-only

Updating user email notification preferences:

  • v1 doesn't have an option to change email only preferences, all the other options are there
  • v2 can only change "email_excluded" property

Would this suffice from a product level?

 

5. Can Khoros be configured to use a custom SMTP relay for sending messages? no such configuration is available from the admin, and to my knowledge we are required to do through a company policy.


Thank you in advance!



Similar question

https://community.khoros.com/t5/Developer-Discussion/Using-Hard-Bounce-Info-to-unsubscribe-people-in-their-IDP-and/m-p/669322

 

 

Community API
Rest API
REST API v2 & LiQL
  • octavian_krody's avatar
    octavian_krody
    Guide
    2 years ago

    I don't know what you mean by EMCS.
    Yes it is only for email notifications, it is strictly related to email bounces and trust scores for domains.

    The questions raised details 2 things.

    I assume Khoros by default does bounce management due to extra headers in the email envelope, how does Khoros treat such cases namely does it turn off email notifications if any action is even performed? and if so how do we tell using existing apis the status of said adresses/accounts to propagate this further in our systems.

    And the other, assuming we change the "from" field on emails this automatic handling will be lost, instrumentation headers are gone (inspected actual email envelopes manually), how would we using existing apis ping Khoros to disable email notifications if we deem the email to be hard bounced.

    Apis we investigated and problems with them are mentioned in the first post.

    Our context is that we need to forward all mails through our own servers which is happening if the "from" setting in the admin is altered to point to our domains. But now email debounce not happening and the domain score for "subscription mails" coming from Khoros impact the whole domain. Ideally we would need a way to stop emails being generated in the first place and we haven't found
    1) ways to detect bounces
    2) create a diff of what accounts have / have not been already disabled and a reasonable way to ping and change the status for accounts

    • MarkSchwanke's avatar
      MarkSchwanke
      Boss
      2 years ago

      I'm also wondering if there is someone who is working on fixing blacklisting issues if you use Sendgrid? I know that Khoros doesn't allow us to see our individual deliverability data. The only way to look at it is through community analytics which doesn't tell you any user level data or domain level data.

      The downside to us using our own proxy server to send emails is that we can't get reply-by-email to work which is a huge dissatisfier for the community members. It does allow us to see the bounce data  however so I can monitor and fix blacklisting issues.

      If we send emails directly from Khoros using Sendgrid we don't have any visibility to know if we're black listed or if there is soft/hard bounces.  Ideally we keep sending to the soft bounces and the hard bounces they're set to an unverified or disabled state until they login and ensure that the email address is valid again. Having a report or integration back into our IDP would be ideal as well to ensure that we're not continually sending to accounts that we know to be failing.

  • SharathTP's avatar
    SharathTP
    Khoros Alumni (Retired)
    2 years ago

    Hi,

    Needed some more context as to what exactly is being checked here.

    1. Is this with respect to only email notifications?
    2. or is this related to EMCS?
    3. Some more detailed explanation and context on where was this checked and what api is being used.
  • JohnD's avatar
    JohnD
    Khoros Alumni (Retired)
    2 years ago

    SudhaN - Do you or someone on the Triumph team have answers to the above questions?