About Delivery Exceptions

This feature allows users to handle emails that bounce back to the system because the original outgoing email could not be delivered to the intended recipient. Emails can bounce back for a number of reasons, like an incorrect email address, a customer mail box that has exceeded its storage limit, or network connectivity issues. Such emails are processed using the delivery exception feature of the application.

Administrators create a list of delivery exception words and phrases, like Out of office, Auto-Reply, mail-daemon, etc., that may appear in the email subject line or email addresses which indicate that an email is a bounce back. If the system finds any of these phrases, it treats the email as a bounced back email. Regular emails that contain phrases configured for delivery exception are also categorized as bounced back emails, and treated as such. Bouncebacks are of two types:

  • Permanent: Indicates that an irreparable reason, such as an invalid email address, caused the email to bounce back. 

  • Temporary: Indicates that a temporary reason, such as an out of office reply or a temporary unavailability of the destination server caused the email to bounce back. The inference here is that should the emails be sent again, there is a chance that they may be delivered.

When the application picks up an email, it checks it for delivery exception words and phrases configured in the system. If the email address or subject contains any of those words, the activity subtype is changed to Email-permanent undeliverable or Email-temporary undeliverable, based on the failure type configured for that word or phrase, and the email activity is sent to the exception queue by the standard start workflow. These activities can be processed from the exception queue by a user with the appropriate permissions. Workflows can also be configured to process activities that are routed to the exception queue.

The application comes with some default delivery exception instances. Should other instances of delivery exception be necessary, they can be created easily from Delivery Exceptions from the Administration Console.

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