Strategy for handle bounced emails in general

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Linwood
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Strategy for handle bounced emails in general

Post by Linwood »

Is there a good discussion somewhere of approaches to handling bounced emails? I am not talking about misconfigured OTRS bounces, but rather bounces that originate from outside sources, whether customers or (less likely) agents. These may be real (customer changes email address and did not tell us), or bogus (I had one bounce from a Norton email anti-virus complaining of an attachment -- there was no attachment), or transient (servers off line for a bit) or user error (mailbox too full).

At present I have outgoing emails (except surveys) originating from the same address that can be used for inbound emails to create/update tickets. If one of these is bounced from a customer, it returns and (depending on the subject line) updates the ticket, or opens a new ticket.

On the one hand this seems desirable, since it lets someone know that email did not reach the intended recipient. On the other hand, depending on notification settings, this can in turn send out yet another email destined either to bounce to the same address (e.g. "thanks for the reply" if it updated the ticket), or maybe bouncing from the postmaster account or whatever account was on the reply (when it opened a new ticket). Either of these have the potential to create a loop (I am aware of some loop detection, have not exercised it, but it appears rather limited in that it just counts exchanges as opposed to any (difficult) analysis of cause).

Setting the outgoing address to something else, e.g. DoNotReply and absorbing any responses to those fixes this entirely, but makes it less likely for unsophisticated customer-users to communicate. The normal reaction to an email is to fire off a reply -- if the reply just disappears they might assume it is received. And while it is satisfying to say "then they are idiots", well, they are customers.

Going back to the former, it is also possible to filter returning email for certain subject or other appearance, to try to siphon off the bounces, but that (in a Dilbert type scenario) might cast too wide of a net, and catch other emails that use these key words and make them disappear. It also then doesn't call anyone's attention to mail that is bouncing. Setting up filters that always create new tickets in a queue without notification is a patch to this but now it is getting deep enough in logic that it may confuse agents even if it is working.

I ramble....

Mostly I am looking for people who have gone thought this in reality (as opposed to a mental exercise prior to going live, which is what I am doing), to share any wisdom they may have as to how to address it that achieves the best balance.
Linwood Ferguson
OTRS 4.0 patch 6, ubuntu 14.04 on HyperV, MySql
crythias
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Re: Strategy for handle bounced emails in general

Post by crythias »

Postmaster Filter
X-OTRS-Ignore = 1
OTRS 6.0.x (private/testing/public) on Linux with MySQL database.
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Linwood
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Re: Strategy for handle bounced emails in general

Post by Linwood »

crythias wrote:Postmaster Filter
X-OTRS-Ignore = 1
Right, I saw that, I see lots of things I can do in postfix rewrite rules.

Unless I am missing the point, though, I am wondering about the implications. This lets you just ignore them. Ignore means they are lost. Have people found that ignoring bounces is best (and let the end user, who didn't get the message, worry about it?)

I may be wrong, but I think I understand the mechanics -- it's the strategy I am asking about. What works best in the real world, make someone review all bounces (and risk/handle loops), let them go into a black hole and wait for a human to speak up? Something else?
Linwood Ferguson
OTRS 4.0 patch 6, ubuntu 14.04 on HyperV, MySql
crythias
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Re: Strategy for handle bounced emails in general

Post by crythias »

1) spam filter
2) ignore
3) junk queue and manually handle
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seberget2
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Re: Strategy for handle bounced emails in general

Post by seberget2 »

Linwood wrote:I may be wrong, but I think I understand the mechanics -- it's the strategy I am asking about. What works best in the real world, make someone review all bounces (and risk/handle loops), let them go into a black hole and wait for a human to speak up? Something else?
I've created the http://opar.perl-services.de/package/S/ ... fice-Reply plug-in that will ignore bounces or auto replies for email coming from a ticket update. Very useful for the upcoming summer vacation season. This plug-in reads the email-headers of the incoming email hand handles it accordingly. Default behaviour is to add the email to the ticket, but not to update the state. See https://www.jitbit.com/maxblog/18-detec ... ss-header/ for the headers I check.

I'm currently in the process of updating the plug-in to also handle tickets in the new state coming in as a result of mailing list send outs (announcement of new software releases) where we have our OTRS email address as from.

This is for the 3.3 release family. I guess converting it to the 4.0 family should be straight forward.

I'm sorry if this reply comes in way to late for you.
OTRS 6.0.12 on Ubuntu with MySQL DB, and various plug-ins and a hack or two :-D
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