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,

Unfortunately there is no BAdI or custom logic available for bounce classification in SAP. The bounce classification is done by ESP and their bounce types / codes / messages might change over time as explained by the following community blog so any custom logic would become obsolete after a while. 

https://community.sap.com/t5/crm-and-cx-blogs-by-sap/sap-marketing-cloud-bounces-management-using-si...

From my perspective, typo mistake leading to an invalid domain should be considered as an exceptional case rather than a recurrent scenario that must be tackled via a custom logic. There are alternatives proposed on the mentioned page above such as suppression list, target group filtering or segmentation. Also, there might be a way from Amazon dashboard to manage suppression list / invalid domains.

I can't comment on the your specific situation where you noticed a lot of missing info without investigating further on your system. Nevertheless I looked at our coding and the info is taken as is from Amazon. For instance,  the diagnostic code is always stored into content_data field, just to mention that field. The interaction reason might be empty if SAP can't match the bounce type / sub type given back from Amazon as explained in my previous reply.

I hope it helps,

Martin.