Huge Issues with Do Not COntacts in M5

Product Support
1

Your software
My Mautic version is: 5
My PHP version is: 8.1
My Database type and version is: Mysql 8

Your problem
My problem is: Users that are marked as Do Not Contact, are still being emailed in campaigns.

These errors are showing in the log: n/a

Steps I have tried to fix the problem:

The campaign is setup to run off of a single filtered segment. When the campaign runs, it sends an email out, waits 5 days, then sends a follow up, and then another 5 days and another follow up.

As this cycle runs, we receive responses for STOP or Unsubscribe which we manually put into Mautic. We take the name / email and find it in our contact list and mark the contact Do Not COntact.

This SHOULD force mautic to not contact the users at all, however, it doesnt. In the cycle above, users tagged DNC in the first iteration, received the second and 3rd emails. Users remvoed in the 2nd iteration, received the 3rd.

Im not sure why this is happening, but my understanding is that once a contact is marked do not contact, they shouldnt EVER be contacted and Mautic should enforce that, as of right now, it doesnt seem to.

The end result is we have people that we have requested removal manunally, and despite being processed into Mautic, mautic keeps on sending them emails.

How do we fix this?

2

This is one of the issues of Mautic 5, that is why until this is resolved, Mautic 5 should not be used in production.

3

Are your emails marked as Marketing, or Transactional, in your campaign?

Transactional mails will still be sent to contacts who have DNC set from Mautic 5.0 onwards, because they should still receive transactional emails (e.g. your account password reset, important info about your account etc).

If you’re sending them marketing emails through your campaign but you’ve got it set to Transactional, then that might be the cause of this issue.

There’s some more context here: The power of emails: unveiling the magic behind marketing and transactional messages - Mautic Community.

4

Hmm, what about sending reputation? If you send emails to bounced contacts it may impact your sending repuration.

5

Our emails are transactional (service agreement reminders) - but if someone opts-out of email, they opt-out of email. Mautic shouldn’t ever send out DNC emails under any circumstances. Its a violation of CAN-SPAM in the US to send out any commercial email after the consent is revoked.

6

If interested, I have made a fix today that do not send out email if bounced at all:

Hope this helps someone.

2 Likes
7

Will that fix my DNC issue? If so, I’d be happy to test it. How do I go about it?

8

Actually, I am sorry this is just for preventing to send emails to contacts that bounced.

For you the code would need to be adjusted a little bit differently (based on your description), and I can help you with that, but I would like to have a short meeting with you before I do that, to verify some things and do not really write the code that is not absolutely necessary.

If you are interested drop me PM and we will arrange a meeting.

Best, M.

9

Sure. Im good with answering some questions to dial things in.

As far as bounces, bounces are an issue as well. We worked around that however, as we thought it was an issue within the cron for email:fetch.

Our email fetch system hasnt worked since we switched to mautic 5. The cron returns an error when it runs about invalid encoding, and then dies. As a result, our mailbox that receives boucnes and replies, hasnt processed anything, it seems to choke on whatever message that is as opposed to ignoring or deleting the erroneous email.

Our solution was to configure our mail server to receive and filter bounce messages into a database table. Then we just export a list of email addresses and imported them into mautic, and suppress our segments against our bounce segment. This solved the bounce issue for us.

1 Like
10

What makes you think so? Transactional emails have nothing to do with consent. E.g. if you have a contractual relationship, there is no way to opt out the communication (would be funny if, say, invoices could be prevented that way…)

2 Likes
12

In our use case, we get people responding to yearly service agreements (its for an AC company), each month a new batch are contacted. Many forget about their AC service agreement and treat it like spam. So we get STOP, Unsubscribe all kinds of stuff replied to the emails that have to be cleaned up. The emails we send are transactional and dont have unsubscribe links, so the customers email us back and we process these requests manually by setting the contact as DNC in Mautic.

When that happens we have to legally stop emailing them. Its them essentially “revoking consent” according to our attorney, and can cause a can-spam violation if the customer wanted to push the matter.

As a result, we filter the DNC contacts into another segment, are exported weekly, and then called manually to set the appointment (because they are, in fact, customers).

13

ok, I guess GDPR has a different concept of consent then (and moreover some attorneys seem have their own concepts too ; )
IMHO it does not make sense to opt out of things like yearly service agreement emails, no matter through what channel.

Anyway, I would think that working with segments sounds like the right right solution for more complex requirements. (It can get tricky, though…)

1 Like
14

I’m interested in knowing how you work with bounces for v4 and v5, if you can help, I’ll appreciate I use Stalwart for my mail server.