Reply management

Reply mails from your customers contain personal data and therefore fall under data protection legislation such as GDPR. This is how reply mails are handled in this regard:

• Retrieval - The only way to retrieve all reply mails from a particular contact is via an Emarsys Support request. (You can open and manually copy the contents of an individual mail, but unless you know the email campaign that triggered the reply, or the date, finding it can be difficult.)
• Deletion - Deleting a reply mail is not possible in the Platform interface. The only way to do this is via an Emarsys Support request.

Automated deletion after 30 days

You can ask Emarsys Support to activate our purge feature which will immediately delete all reply mails older than 30 days, and automatically delete them after this time period in the future. The situation will therefore be as follows:

• Retrieval - Reply mails are automatically purged after 30 days, so locating and copying individual reply mails from a contact should not be too hard. However, if your volume is high enough that you are afraid of missing something, you can submit an Emarsys Support request for an export of all mails from a particular contact. 
• Deletion - Since no reply mails are stored for longer than 30 days, and GDPR allows a 30-day window for deletion, all such requests are self-fulfilling and you need take no action.

To set up a dedicated domain for reply management, proceed as follows:

1. Register a domain or create a subdomain.

Attention: Domains/subdomains which were already set up for the display of trackable links in the Emarsys application and changed to Emarsys per C-Name entry, cannot be used.

1. Have your provider or network administrator show you the MX record of the domain or subdomain for Emarsys. The name server entry for the MX record must be changed.
   • If you make the entry in an administration menu interface, enter mx.eemms.net. as a target in the MX entry of the favoured domain or subdomain. All other settings can remain unchanged.
   • If you make the entry via an admin console, enter the following in the zonefile of the domain/subdomain:
     IN                MX                10             mx.eemms.net
2. Please provide Emarsys Support with the domain/subdomain name used, so that we can activate the domain/subdomain for your account.

For each reply email address, all emails are subdivided into six categories:

• Unsubscribe
  These reply emails were sent by contacts as a means to unsubscribe (instead of clicking the unsubscribe button). They need to be acted upon, since any further emails from your side might be reported as spam.
• Change-profile
  These are automated or manual reply emails that indicate that the contact has changed jobs or the company domain has changed. They are crucial for updating contact data and keeping email addresses valid.
• Challenge Response
  These reply emails constitute an anti-spam technique (US only) which sends emails only after senders have authenticated (by clicking a link or sending an email with content that cannot be generated automatically). This way some companies/providers try to avoid (automatically generated) emails from mass email senders. If  an email inbox server was configured for challenge response, it sends an email to the reply email address of your email; the potential recipient, who wants to receive your emails, does not receive any.
• Contact us
  These reply emails indicate that a recipient wants to get in touch with you. They are triggered by clicking the Reply button in the email.
• Out of Office
  These are out-of-office reply emails.
• Unknown
  These reply emails could not be categorized. Emarsys improves the categorization rules on a constant basis, so that there will be fewer and fewer reply mails assigned to this category.

The Inbox tab displays a list of reply emails which were sent to Emarsys.

Filter reply list

The list can be filtered using the following criteria:

• Go to Email and select a specific email to view the corresponding reply emails.
• Go to Category and select a reply email category.
• Go to Mailboxes and specify a mailbox.
• Go to Time range and select a start and end date; the list displays only reply emails which were received within this period.

The Email recipient column of the list contains the email addresses of your recipients; as a rule, the From column displays the same email address. If these email addresses are not identical, the sender of the reply mail has used a different email account (a different email address, an alias) for his/her message. In addition, the list has columns for the subject line of your email, the reply email category and the date when the reply email was sent.

To view detailed information on a specific reply email, tick the corresponding check box and click Show message.

To access the contact profile associated with an email address in the list, tick the corresponding check box and click Edit contact profile.

On the Actions tab, you create reply mailboxes and decide how reply mails are to be handled.

Create reply mailbox

1. Click Create New to open the corresponding dialog box.
2. Replace the undefined string with a string of your choice. This constitutes the address component prefixing the @ sign; for the domain name suffixing the @ sign you can use either eemms.net (the Emarsys email domain) or an existing customized domain/subdomain.

Attention: The domain/subdomain you specify is reserved for Emarsys emails. You cannot use email domains for which you have already set up inboxes with other mail servers.

1. Click Create Address to add the address to the list.
2. To remove an address, tick the corresponding check box and click Delete Address.

Define how to handle reply mails

1. Select a Reply mailbox.
2. Click Edit.
3. For each category you can select one of the following actions:
   • Forward – Reply emails with this category assigned are forwarded to one or several email addresses, which you can enter in the Forward to column. Multiple email addresses must be separated by ‘;’.
   • Forward with action buttons – Reply emails with this category assigned are forwarded to the email addresses which you enter on the right. See below for use cases.
   • Ignore – Reply emails with this category assigned can be ignored; e.g. Out-of-Office emails.

If you want the system to automatically delete the reply mails after the defined action has been performed, activate the Delete option.

The purpose of this feature is to make it easier for you to act when a contact sends a reply mail, by providing a number of predefined actions. If you set this option for a particular category, those reply mails are forwarded to the email address(es) entered and a button is added to execute the appropriate action.

For example, if you enable this for unsubscribes, a button will be provided for you to unsubscribe the contact immediately.