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Bounces and Invalid Emails

There are many reasons why an email is not delivered to the recipient.

  • Auto-responses and Vacation Replies
  • Email delivered to “Junk” or “Spam” folder of recipient
  • General undeliverable emails with no error specified by recipient’s server
  • Recipient email server is down or unreachable
  • “Connection timed out”
  • Recipient mail box full
  • Recipient email address not found
  • Temporary non-delivery (server will keep trying for a few more days)
  • Your server IP is blocked by recipient’s ISP (“Relaying Denied”)
  • Your server IP is blacklisted for suspected spam

And the list goes on!

That should give you an idea why email delivery is so tricky and complicated, which is what created a niche for the email delivery industry, and which is why companies like Aweber, MailChimp and GetResponse even came into existence and have thrived while charging a hefty fee for what you would think is the simple act of delivering email over the interwebs.

When you use DAP for sending out emails (whether autoresponder or broadcast emails), the “From Name” and “From Email” you set up in the DAP Config are used to send out the emails.

If you use your own web host as the “carrier”, then your web host’s email server is the one that carries the email and tries to deliver to the inbox of the recipient. And web hosts are generally not very good at the intricate science of email delivery, which is why if you’re going to use DAP, we recommend that you bypass your web host and have a third-party email system like Amazon SES deliver your emails.

Regardless of the carrier (web host, Amazon SES, AuthSMTP.com, etc), all bounced and undeliverable emails come back to the “From Email” that you have used under DAP Config.

DAP by itself does not do anything with those emails, as those emails don’t come back to DAP, but they go straight to the inbox of whatever “From Email” you have specified.

We will surely address this in the future. But for now, you will have to manually review those email bounces, see which one of them sound more serious (like, say, recipient email id not found, or domain no longer in use, etc), and then de-activate those email id’s from your DAP database.

When you use Amazon SES, Amazon by itself also monitors email id’s that have a consistent history of bouncing back, and will automatically suppress those email id’s and won’t even deliver email to those email id’s even if DAP did send the actual email to those id’s.

Troubleshooting Amazon SES Integration

DAP’s Amazon SES integration has been heavily tested, and we use it ourselves at DigitalAccessPass.com . So you can rest assured that there are no “bugs” of any kind.

Here are some troubleshooting steps if SES integration is not working even after you’ve followed the documentation exactly.

Troubleshooting SES

  1. MOST COMMON MISTAKE: Have you whitelisted the DAP “From” email in Amazon? And have you used exact same “case” for the email id in both places (DAP and Amazon)? Double-check spelling and case in both DAP and Amazon – they must be EXACTLY the same. For eg., you@yoursite.com is NOT the same as You@YourSite.com as far as Amazon is concerned. So if you’ve set the “From Email” in DAP to be you@yoursite.com, then you must whitelist exactly the same email id you@yoursite.com within your Amazon SES account as well. If you are not sure, delete the whitelisted email in your SES account, then COPY the from-email from DAP config (be sure to copy, and not re-type) and then PASTE the exact from-email into your Amazon SES account and whitelist it again.
  2. IMPORTANT: Have you requested Amazon for “Production Access” to your SES account? Being in “Sandbox” mode has its disadvantages (you can only send “from” and “to” whitelisted” emails ONLY). So your account MUST, MUST, MUST be in “Production” mode before Amazon SES lets you send emails to your customers.
  3. Are you using the exact ports as mentioned in our documentation? Ignore the port #s that Amazon recommends.
  4. IMPORTANT: Double-check with your web host to make sure that they actually allow a plugin like DAP to connect to a third-party server like Amazon SES to send out emails. Some hosts don’t even allow that to begin with (like BlueHost, for eg.)
  5. Turn on the logs by setting DAP > Setup > Config > Log Level to “Log All Activity”.
  6. Then go to System > Logs and clear the logs. Then go to one of your test accounts, and edit the user.
  7. On the “User Edit” page, click on “Resend Login/Password”.
  8. Check the email inbox to see if you got the email. If you didn’t, go to System > Logs and take the entire logs shown there, and paste it into a support ticket, and don’t forget to give us your WP login info and FTP info (and if possible, Amazon login info as well), and we’ll troubleshoot it.
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AuthSMTP Integration

If you’re having email delivery issues on your host, you can connect DAP to 3rd-party email systems like Amazon SES and AuthSMTP.

In this article, you’ll see how to integrate DAP with AuthSMTP.

  1. Signup for an account at AuthSMTP
  2. Log in to your AuthSMTP account
  3. Go to Registered From Address tab
  4. Take the email id from DAP Admin > Setup > Config > From-Email Id and enter that email here and register it here (basically, you’re whitelisting your DAP Admin email id as a registered sender – if you don’t do this, AuthSMTP will reject and discard all emails sent via DAP). You will need to “Confirm” the registration by clicking on an activation link that they will be sending you.
  5. In your AuthSMTP account, go to SMTP Details tab.
  6. Make a note of the SMTP Server (usually mail.authsmtp.com), SMTP Username, SMTP Password.
  7. Now log in to DAP Admin, and go to Email > SMTP
  8. On this screen, use the section Add a New SMTP Server to create a new SMTP row as follows:
    Description: AuthSMTP
    Server: mail.authsmtp.com (or from Step 6 above)
    Port: 2525 (must be exactly that)
    SSL: N (must be exactly that)
    User Id: Your AuthSMTP Username (from Step 6 above)
    Password: Your AuthSMTP Password (from Step 6 above)
    Email Sending Limit Per Hour: 500
    (Max 500 if on shared server. Max 2000 if VPS or dedicated server)
    Activated: Y
  9. Click on the “Add” button to create and save the new AuthSMTP server setting.
  10. And now you should see two rows under Manage Existing SMTP Servers: One for “Local Web Host” and another for “AuthSMTP”.
  11. For the “Local Web Host” row, be sure to set “Active” to “N” – because now that you have set up AuthSMTP, you want all instant welcome emails, autoresponder and broadcast emails to be sent out through AuthSMTP, and not your web host’s email server.

That’s it!