Tridion Outbound Email - Mailing statistics like failed/read are not getting updated, only the tridion is showing sent status,,

Question

I am using the outbound email and facing one problem related to getting the status of mailing in tridion. The tridion is showing only the Sent count on the mailer statistics. I tried refreshing the status as well still it is not showing the failed and read emails data.

I am not able to find any settings which are related to these. Please help me by giving some reference on how can i track the bounce emails stats in failed and read emails stats in emails read fields in tridion.

Thanks a lot in advance!

Answer 1

There's a couple of reasons why you might not see anything under Read:

1. All Contacts have taken some action. The main categories are mutually exclusive, meaning a Contact that has clicked on a link will only show up as "Action taken" even though he/she has clearly also read the e-mail.
2. You don't actually have the 'open image' in your Mailing. The only way to know if an e-mail has been opened is to include an image that is loaded from your website and then track that download. Using DWT, this is accomplished using the @@OutboundEmail_OpenTracking@@ placeholder. See "Tracking e-mail opening" in the documentation.
3. All of the Contacts are using an e-mail client that is blocking the loading of images for your e-mails. This is widespread now and cannot be bypassed. You can only hope they trust you enough to allow downloading of the images at some point.

As for never seeing any Failed (bounced) numbers, I have the following suggestions:

1. Ensure that you have an e-mail account that you can use to handle bounces (IMAP or POP3) and a different one to check for actual replies from your Contacts.
2. Specify the bounce e-mail address as the Sender address in your Mailings and the reply one in the "Reply address" field.
3. Configure the Bounce Processing section in the configuration file. See "Configuring bounce processing" in the documentation. Until you are confident that everything is running as it should, I recommend setting up forwarding as part of it. Then you can manually check the kinds of messages that are not being recognized, which will aid in troubleshooting.
4. Again, make sure your Mailing has at least one tracked link - and preferably in the first couple hundred characters (as some SMTP servers don't return the full original message, but only a part of it).
5. Ensure the Bounce Processor service is running and not logging any errors.