Bounce Details Amazon SES

[vervinckt_joyca]

Hi,

I'm looking for more details on the Bounce interactions that come in to SAP Marketing Cloud via Amazon SES.

The reason is that we get quite a lot of Soft Bounces that I believe should be Hard Bounces.

For example emails to an email address ending in @sknet.be which is a typo and should be skynet.be . But a soft bounce comes in on that address... Neverbounce does indicate this as an invalid address, so I am wondering why Amazon classifies it as a soft bounce.

I have already tried to look in the following fields for more details about the bounces:

• Interaction Reason
• Content Data

These fields sometimes contain additional data, but not in the case of my bounce on the @sknet address, on that case it is empty (and on a lot more cases too, about half of the soft bounces do have some value in the fields, the other half does not).

I also checked the analytics report mentioned on https://community.sap.com/t5/crm-and-cx-blogs-by-sap/sap-marketing-cloud-email-bounce-monitoring-bes... , there is a field "Bus. Doc. Stat. Des." where for some soft bounces, more info about the smtp status code is mentioned, but still a large majority of soft bounces have an empty value in that field, including the soft bounce of the @sknet address case...

Does anyone know of any other data or fields that can be checked to get more detailed technical information about the bounce? 

Thanks,

Joyca

[martin_parent]

Hello Joyca,

An invalid email address should produce a hard bounce. In such case, the expected bounce type returned by Amazon should be 'permanent' as per the following AWS documentation.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/notification-contents.html#bounce-types

If SAP does not get back that precise bounce type value then everything else is considered as soft bounce. And because of that, SAP can't provide further details as the sub type returned does not match the expected sub types that usually soft bounces would get. So the first step would be to know which bounce type is returned for your email sendings. Maybe create an incident for Amazon or try to look at their bounce monitoring tool. 

Also, some users have experienced a different bounce type returned by Amazon for invalid domains. See the following post: https://repost.aws/knowledge-center/ses-understand-soft-bounces

If the expected bounce type is returned correctly by Amazon then feel free to create an incident for SAP Marketing Cloud and we will be glad to assist.

Best regards,

Martin Parent

SAP Marketing Cloud Development.

[vervinckt_joyca]

Hi @martin_parent ,

We are not eligible to create tickets at Amazon.

However, I did also read that post where other users indicate that they are getting Transient = soft bounce replies from Amazon in case of "invalid domain". This is really annoying because "invalid domain" is clearly a hard bounce.

I am looking for a way to correct this in SAP Marketing Cloud, as it will not be possible from Amazon side as the other users already complained about that over a year ago.

Is there Custom Logic available that we can use for this?

And if there is Custom Logic available, in which field would I be able to see Amazon's returned bounceSubType and diagnosticCode?

As mentioned, I did already check in SMC the fields "interaction reason" and "content data / Bus. Doc. Stat. Des." . These fields sometimes contain that info on the bounceSubType and diagnosticCode, but not always. And mainly in these annoying cases with invalid domains, these fields remain empty on SAP Marketing Cloud... I don't understand why this field sometimes gets data and sometimes it does not...

Kind regards

Joyca