XF 1.5 Why would AWS SES show bounces but they aren't in the XF Bounce Log?

[motowebmaster]

I'm a late-adopter of the email bounce feature and recently changed my outbound XF emails to send through Amazon SES. Setup a separate bounce email address and got it all working without errors. Sending at least 500 notices per day. I'm still using my current email provider for everything else.

However in my AWS Statistics it shows a few bounces, but they aren't in the XF bounce log. I didn't have "Enable variable bounced email address values" enabled until two days ago, but after turning it on there still isn't anything showing in the XF admin email bounce log.

The maximum number of bounced emails AWS SES shows is seven per day, not sure if that matters.

 

[Alpha1]

Amazon SES is not compatible with XF bounce system. XF also doesn't support greylisting or complaints which Amazon does allow you to process.
You can get some bounces show up in XF through setting up SNS. More information in this topic:

Amazon SES and Xenforo

Hi all, Looking to move my Xenforo transnational email from the local host to SES. Reading on here, I need to apply for a message limit to remove me from sandbox mode, this will then give me a peak number of messages per day and per month, but it also has a peak rate limitation as well, and if...

xenforo.com

If you want XF to add Amazon SES bounce processing then vote for it here:

No email bounce log action from Amazon SES spam complaints

When a user marks email received from your site as 'spam' in their mail application, the majority of mail applications will then send a spam/abuse notification back to the sending server complaints process. For Amazon SES, they then send/forward an email to you of the spam/abuse complaint...

xenforo.com

Statistics for Email Sent, Bounces & Complaints

Its important to see if your bounce rate is getting high. Because a high bounce rate means your email can get blocked by email providers or even your own email provider if you have one. Providers like Amazon will ban you if your bounce rate gets too high. Email services like yahoo will greylist...

xenforo.com

If you want to resolve this with an addon then inquire @DragonByte Tech as they already created this functionality for XF1 and Fillip was considering to add it to his DBT Mail addon for XF2.

[DBTech] DragonByte Mail [Paid]

DragonByte Tech submitted a new resource: [DBTech] DragonByte Mail - Create newsletter emails to your members. DragonByte Mail is a professional mailing list mod with advanced subscription management features. Additionally, it has a newsletter feature that highlights your most popular threads...

xenforo.com

 

[motowebmaster]

Thanks for the reply @Alfa1, amazing that all of this went by me

So for XF1 is the solution to utilize an addon, or switch to Mailgun?

 

[HWS]

You won't ever get all email problems into the bounce log. For example sometimes no bounces are generated because the mail server does not even accept the mail.

We use SES successfully without any add-on. We just setup a dedicated bounce mailbox which gets called by Xenforo. We also activated "Enable variable bounced email address values". No need to setup SNS, but we did for information only (no feed into XF) and see a very small amount of e-mails with problems which we handle manually.

 

[motowebmaster]

We use SES successfully without any add-on. We just setup a dedicated bounce mailbox which gets called by Xenforo. We also activated "Enable variable bounced email address values". No need to setup SNS, but we did for information only (no feed into XF) and see a very small amount of e-mails with problems which we handle manually.

Got it.

Care to share how you setup SNS to handle bounces?

 

[HWS]

Care to share how you setup SNS to handle bounces?

It's been a long time since we set this up. So I don't know the exact steps.

It was like: We created a new SNS topic for the notifications, subscribed to it and setup the "Bounce Notifications SNS Topic" und "Complaint Notifications SNS Topic" in the domains SES settings to use this SNS topic.

 

[motowebmaster]

Thanks for the feedback, I found this guide:

Configuring Amazon SNS notifications for Amazon SES - Amazon Simple Email Service

Configure Amazon SNS notifications for Amazon SES on a per-verified-identity basis.

docs.aws.amazon.com

Got the SNS setup for bounces (I think), disabled/removed the XF Bounce settings for now. According to SES, the most I'm currently bouncing per day is eight.

My preference is to utilize the automated XF feature, but will see what the damage is and handle it manually for now.

Thanks Again for the guidance. Didn't realize I was stomping on a sensitive issue

 

[motowebmaster]

Just a FYI that Amazon's bounce function, with SNS configured, was easier than I thought.

Going back to the XF admin and manually changing user's state isn't that much fun, but users are correcting their profiles

 

[Alpha1]

We just setup a dedicated bounce mailbox which gets called by Xenforo. We also activated "Enable variable bounced email address values". No need to setup SNS, but we did for information only (no feed into XF) and see a very small amount of e-mails with problems which we handle manually.

In my experience this does not capture all bounces. Quite some time ago I did the same but also signed up to all feedback loops. The feedback loops showed that there was a lot that was not getting into the xf bounce log. So I switched to SNS.

SNS topics are not handled by XF. So I hired @DragonByte Tech to create functionality for it. After testing this for quite some time on my big board, it handles complaints and greylisting correctly. It works for XF1 and SNS bounces result in automatic user state changes. I hope this functionality will get added to DBT Mail addon for XF2.

 

[snoopy5]

So I hired @DragonByte Tech to create functionality for it. After testing this for quite some time on my big board, it handles complaints and greylisting correctly. It works for XF1 and SNS bounces result in automatic user state changes.

Is this an XF1.5x addon which is sold somewhere? If yes where?

 

[Alpha1]

@DragonByte Tech

 

[DragonByte Tech]

Is this an XF1.5x addon which is sold somewhere? If yes where?

This isn't included in the XF 1.5 add-on because it physically can't be - it had to be file edits. If @Alfa1 wants to share the edits that's entirely fine by me, but it is entirely impossible to include this in an add-on as the required classes cannot be extended like they can be in XF2.