More on VERPs

One of the biggest complaints about Campaign Enterprise is the fact that you must set up a separate bounce email account for every table or record set to which you are connected. If you have multiple campaigns pointing to the same table, you can configure one of your campaigns to process the bounces. Regardless of which campaign sent the email, that campaign can find the record in the table and update it accordingly. Should you connect to separate tables, managing bounces becomes more problematic and you have to have multiple campaigns monitoring multiple accounts, increasing the pop processing load.

Now, you can change all that in Campaign Enterprise Version 11. With the introduction of variable envelope return paths (VERPs) you only need one bounce email account to monitor all of your campaigns, regardless of the source table. Here is how it works:

• Create an email account on your mail server with a wild card in the name portion of the address, e.g. *@domainname.com
• Create an Email Account connection in Campaign Enterprise, pointing to this new account
• In the Compose Message tab, enter the following for your Bounce Email Address, {VERPS}@domainname.com
• The return path address will look something like this, --00001831@domainname.com
• You still need to enable one campaign, pointing to this account to process bounces

In addition to just a straight variable in your email address, you can use the following combinations, bounce*@domainname.com, bounce*address@domainname.com, *bounce@domainname.com. As long as your email server can use a wild card for the name of the account, you can use the VERP feature. The wild card will account for the variable portion of the return path address. The variable portion of the email address is read by Campaign when the POP check occurs. This information contains information on the campaign that sent the email and the unique id of the record. The variable now allows Campaign to pass back important information that it could not before. In the near future, rather than linking the VERP enabled account to a particular campaign, you will be able to enable that directly in the Email Accounts area for a true global bounce processor.

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