Summary
Specifying the sender's email address as the return path is a detrimental practice impacting email deliverability and sender reputation. This configuration disrupts automated bounce processing, leading to unhandled bounces, cluttered inboxes, and difficulties in managing legitimate replies. It negatively affects sender reputation, hinders list cleaning, increases bounce rates, and can lead to blacklisting. Proper bounce management, facilitated by a dedicated bounce address and automated processes, is crucial for maintaining list hygiene, avoiding spam complaints, and ensuring positive sender reputation, ultimately leading to improved engagement metrics and adherence to email standards.
Key findings
- Disrupted Bounce Handling: Automated bounce processing is disrupted, making it difficult to identify and remove invalid email addresses.
- Cluttered Inboxes: Sender inboxes get cluttered with bounce messages, making it difficult to manage legitimate replies.
- Negative Impact on Reputation: Sender reputation is negatively impacted through increased bounce rates and potential blacklisting.
- Impeded List Cleaning: Effective list cleaning is hindered, making it harder to differentiate between legitimate replies and bounce messages.
- Compliance Concerns: It becomes difficult to comply with anti-spam regulations due to the inability to effectively process bounces.
- Operational Issues: Sender's systems might not be equipped to handle the high volume of bounces.
- Broken Automated Process: The Return-Path is designed for automated processing, and using the sender's address breaks this automated process.
- Organizational Nightmares: The setup leads to cluttered inboxes, difficult organisation and potential missed communication.
Key considerations
- Dedicated Bounce Address: Use a dedicated bounce address separate from the sender's email address.
- Automated Processing: Implement automated bounce processing to identify and remove invalid email addresses.
- List Hygiene: Maintain a clean email list by regularly removing bounced email addresses.
- Monitor Reputation: Monitor sender reputation and take steps to improve it through proper bounce handling.
- Subdomain Configuration: Configure the bounce address as a subdomain pointing to MX records of the ESP.
- Review ESP Configuration: Review the ESP configuration to ensure that the ESP is handling 5xx rejections.
- Infrastructure: Use a dedicated infrastructure for handling feedback loops and bounce data.
What email marketers say
11 marketer opinions
Specifying the sender's email address as the return path is detrimental to email deliverability and sender reputation. This practice leads to cluttered inboxes, makes it difficult to manage legitimate replies, and prevents automated bounce processing. It negatively impacts sender reputation by hindering effective list cleaning, increasing bounce rates, and potentially leading to blacklisting. Proper bounce management requires a dedicated bounce address to ensure effective list hygiene, avoid spam complaints, and maintain a positive sending reputation.
Key opinions
- Cluttered Inboxes: Using the sender's address as the return path clutters the inbox with bounce messages, making it difficult to manage legitimate replies.
- Impeded Bounce Processing: It prevents automated bounce processing, hindering the removal of invalid email addresses from mailing lists.
- Negative Reputation Impact: It negatively impacts sender reputation by increasing bounce rates and potentially leading to blacklisting.
- Poor List Hygiene: Effective list hygiene becomes impossible, leading to decreased engagement and increased spam complaints.
- Organizational Issues: The inability to organize replies and bounce emails from the same inbox is an organizational nightmare, leading to missed communications.
Key considerations
- Dedicated Bounce Address: Implement a dedicated bounce address for proper bounce management.
- Automated Bounce Processing: Use a system that automatically processes bounces and removes invalid email addresses from the mailing list.
- List Hygiene: Maintain a clean email list by regularly removing bounced email addresses.
- Sender Reputation: Monitor sender reputation and take steps to improve it by ensuring proper bounce handling.
- MX Records: Ensure the bounce address is a subdomain pointing to MX records of the ESP to process all bounces.
Marketer view
Email marketer from SendPulse explains that specifying the sender's address as the return path can lead to deliverability issues due to the inability to automatically process and remove bounced email addresses from the mailing list, leading to higher bounce rates and potential blacklisting.
8 Jun 2023 - SendPulse
Marketer view
Email marketer from Reddit shares that using the sender's address as the return path clutters the inbox making it difficult to organise replies and bounce emails, and is an organizational nightmare, leading to missed communications and poor inbox management.
22 Mar 2023 - Reddit
What the experts say
6 expert opinions
Specifying the sender's email address as the return path is a bad practice primarily because it disrupts proper bounce management. It leads to unhandled asynchronous bounces, meaning the ESP isn't processing failures correctly. This setup gives customers bounces they can't act on and bypasses automated bounce processing, degrading list quality and deliverability. Ultimately, neglecting bounce management harms sender reputation.
Key opinions
- Unhandled Asynchronous Bounces: The ESP doesn't see/handle asynchronous bounces when the return path is the sender's address.
- Poor Customer Experience: Customers receive bounces they can't do anything about.
- Bypassed Automated Processing: Automated bounce processing is bypassed, hindering the identification and removal of invalid email addresses.
- Degraded List Quality: Failure to properly handle bounces leads to degraded list quality.
- Harm to Reputation: Not doing bounce management will significantly harm sender reputation.
- Broken Process: The Return-Path is supposed to be used for automated processing of failures, not a human readable address. By putting the sender's address in the return path the automated process is broken.
Key considerations
- Fix the Setup: The misconfiguration needs to be investigated and fixed.
- Bounce Management: Implement a comprehensive bounce management strategy, handling both synchronous and asynchronous bounces.
- Review Configuration: Carefully review the ESP's configuration to ensure proper bounce handling.
- Consider Mailbox Provider: Understand how different mailbox providers handle bounces, as the impact can vary.
- Dedicated Return-Path: Use a dedicated return-path address different from the sender's address for automated bounce processing.
Expert view
Expert from Email Geeks says that this is a bad setup. It could just be a configuration issue, but it's something to look at and fix.
6 Nov 2022 - Email Geeks
Expert view
Expert from Email Geeks confirms that the ESP isn't seeing the async bounces at all.
28 Oct 2021 - Email Geeks
What the documentation says
4 technical articles
Specifying the sender's email address as the return path is a bad practice because it disrupts established mechanisms for handling bounce messages and feedback loops. The 'Return-Path' header is designed for automated bounce processing, and using the sender's address circumvents this process, leading to operational issues, difficulty complying with anti-spam regulations, disrupted feedback loops, and potential deliverability issues and blacklisting. A dedicated bounce mailbox is essential for effective bounce management and maintaining a positive sending reputation.
Key findings
- Circumvents Automated Processing: Using the sender's address circumvents automated bounce processing mechanisms.
- Operational Issues: Sender's systems might not be equipped to handle high volumes of bounce messages.
- Anti-Spam Compliance Issues: It becomes difficult to comply with anti-spam regulations.
- Disrupted Feedback Loops: Using the sender's email disrupts proper handling of feedback loops.
- Deliverability Issues: It leads to potential deliverability issues and possible blacklisting.
Key considerations
- Dedicated Bounce Mailbox: Use a dedicated bounce mailbox for effective bounce management.
- Proper Handling of Feedback Loops: Ensure proper handling of feedback loops to maintain a positive sending reputation.
- Infrastructure: Utilize dedicated infrastructure for handling bounces and feedback loops.
- Adherence to Standards: Adhere to email standards like RFC 5321 for proper email handling.
Technical article
Documentation from RFC Editor specifies that the 'Return-Path' header is intended to designate a mailbox to which bounce messages should be sent. Using the sender's actual address can lead to operational issues if the sender's system is not equipped to handle a high volume of bounce messages.
8 Apr 2024 - RFC Editor
Technical article
Documentation from Mailgun specifies that dedicated infrastructure for handling bounces and feedback loops is vital for maintaining high deliverability rates. Directing bounces to the sender's inbox bypasses this infrastructure, leading to deliverability issues and potential blacklisting.
23 Jan 2022 - Mailgun
Against which domain is SPF checked?
Can a bouncing reply-to address affect Verizon domain performance?
Can smtp.mailfrom be different from return-path and can bounces be returned directly to sender?
Does BIMI require strict alignment between From and return-path domains?
How do I ensure email deliverability with different return-path addresses and subdomains?
How do SPF, DKIM, and DMARC affect email deliverability with Cvent?
