Basics on returning mails (Bounce-Emails) 

A marketing campaign does not end when the newsletter is sent out. Experience shows that 3–10% of the sent items will bounce back into the BACKCLICK system. These e-mails are returned by mail servers (SMTP server), and automatic answering systems, as well as by recipients who manually return your newsletters. All of these e-mails must be sorted. Many enterprises try to avoid this absolutely necessary work step, but there is high risk involved in not reacting to critical e-mails. 

Bounce e-mails may be categorized as follows: 

• Address inactive/removed/invalid (Hard Bounce)
• Recipient activated an out-of-office message (Soft Bounce)
• Recipient tells of a change of e-mail address via Autoresponder (Soft Bounce)
• Recipient calls for an authentification of the sender (Soft Bounce)
• The mailbox of the recipient is full and will not accept any more e-mails. (Soft Bounce)
• Virus- or worm-infected e-mails (Soft Bounce)
• Wishes or ideas of receivers (including orders for products or services)
• Recipient wishes to unsubscribe (Soft Bounce)
• Warnings about sending newsletters that were not requested (Soft Bounce)

Using a combination of integrated neural and statistical methods for filtration, BACKCLICK’s IMF will make the work ofsorting e-mails easier for you. BACKCLICK scrutinizes the main content of every e-mail, and calculates the probability for its being assigned to one of the above categories. If an e-mail does not fit any of the existing categories, BACKCLICK can create a new category at any time. 

The incoming e-mails are stored in your BACKCLICK system and may be accessed at any time. You can check to see if an e-mail can be assigned to a subscriber in the BACKCLICK system. To do this, use the function “incoming mail traffic” under the menu item “Edit subscriber.” 

Do not use the IMF for the following: 

The IMF is not intended for storing bounce e-mails in the system with large files attached, or for forwarding this e-mails. 

When BACKCLICK processes the e-mails, all attachments are deleted, and the body of the bounce e-mail is shortened to 2 

kilobytes. Experience has shown that all the information needed to categorize the e-mail may be found in these 2 kilobytes.