Handling of bounced emails?

💬 General Discussion
1

Hi,

I’ve some users using the built-in email client of SuiteCRM v7.1.2.

They send an email answering a case using it,
and they make a typo in the email address of one CC’d person
(goof @ foo.com ) for example.

If they were using their native email client, they would get back a “Delivery Status Notification (failed)” email
informing them that the email they typed is incorrect.

When using the built-in email client of SuiteCRM, they get nothing!
They don’t even know that the email did not reach its recipient.

I’ve also searched the emails_text table,
and I cannot find a bounce back.

How is this handled in SuiteCRM? How can I provide feedback to the User that he had made a typo?

2

Any bounce message would go to the email address specified as the sender of the outbound email. That might, or might not, be the email address you expect it to be. Make sure that the FROM: email address (and REPLY-TO:) show the correct mailbox address; I found that by default, when I sent email from a user account, it was sent via the Administrator’s mailbox (and badly, since it FORGED the sender’s email address even though it was sent from a different mailbox). In this situation, a bounce message would probably go to the Administrator’s mailbox, not the user’s.

Try sending an email from SuiteCRM to a personal mailbox, and see what it shows. (You should “view full headers” or “view message source” to see the actual source mailbox, in addition to the “from” and “reply-to” addresses which are normally visible.)

Then reply to that email from the personal mailbox, and see if that reply is retrieved by SuiteCRM when you tell it to check for mail.

Within SuiteCRM, the “inbound” (IMAP/POP3) email settings must be separately configured, from the “outbound” (SMTP) email setup … for every mailbox and each user (so that’s 2 places to configure the settings for each user, plus 2 more places to configure the settings for the Administrator).

Also note that by default, SuiteCRM only retrieves emails from the Inbox, Trash, and Sent folders – so it won’t pick up emails in the “Spam” or “Junk” folder (which is where some “bounce” messages might be placed) unless you configure it to retrieve mail from that IMAP folder.

Another issue: check if inbound email to that mailbox is being forwarded to a different email address. I’ve configured our SuiteCRM installation so that outbound emails from the system are sent as "system@example-domain.com" but I configured that mailbox so that incoming emails are forwarded to my mailbox, so I don’t have to separately check multiple mailboxes for administration-related email. (This is probably not a wise tactic if you have many users AND use the default SuiteCRM settings, which generate emails for each ‘assignment’ to a user.)

Note also that depending on the configuration of your outbound mail server, it might make multiple delivery attempts before “bouncing.” And of course, it’s conceivable that your outbound mail server could be configured to not generate bounce messages at all.

And of course, make sure that the destination email address really isn’t valid, and the receiving mail server is generating a “permanent error” rather than a temporary error (mailbox not currently available due to backup process, or mailbox full). I used f87yaf79q43874ytdfughsdfljkghw58t7htftkgjh@gmail.com and gmail’s server responded with “550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist…” which was dutifully sent by our mail server to the source mailbox.