Enterprise Reply Mail Management

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Enterprise Reply Mail Management

To automate management of incoming messages received by your reply-to email address, turn on Reply Mail Management in Marketing Cloud Engagement. These message types include out-of-office replies, auto-replies, auto-forwards, unsubscribes, and individual customer responses.

Note Refer to Reply Mail Management (RMM) for more information about the RMM feature included as part of the Sender Authentication Package (SAP). The information in this document refers to a separate feature.

Enterprise Reply Mail Management efficiently handles a large percentage of replies immediately and automatically. Depending on your configuration, some email types do not have to be opened or read. Enterprise Reply Mail Management automatically processes all necessary actions for the reply.

Configure your account to use a special Reply-To address in your emails. When a subscriber manually replies to the address or when the subscriber's account automatically replies, the email message goes to the Reply-To address you created. When the Reply-To address receives an email, Enterprise Reply Mail Management applies a series of rules grouped in collections associated with a sender profile. These collections determine whether the email is an out-of-office reply, auto-reply, such as a allowlist request, or unsubscribe request. Enterprise Reply Mail Management acts on the message according to how you configured the feature.

Enterprise Reply Mail Management also allows you to perform these tasks:

Forward an email to different users depending on different circumstances
Conditionally auto-reply and control the content of that auto-reply message

Configure Enterprise Reply Mail Management on the Enterprise Reply Mail Management screen, accessed from the Admin tab of Email Studio. If that feature is enabled, the configuration process includes adding terms to the terms already listed in this document.

Reply Mail Mangement coniguration process

Enterprise Reply Mail Management feature addresses most automated replies from email software used today. However, it cannot address non-standard protocols from a select few email clients.

Enterprise Reply Mail Management can support the forwarding of attachments in certain instances.

Reply Address Definition

When you configure Enterprise Reply Mail Management, you specify the Reply-To information used by Enterprise Reply Mail Management:

Email Display Name: The reply name appears in the From field of your subscriber's email client, such as Microsoft Outlook, when the subscriber replies to your email. Do not use an email address as the Email Reply Name. To encourage interaction with your subscribers, use an individual's name from your organization, such as a member of your customer service group.
Reply Subdomain: The subdomain includes the portion of your URL that points to Engagement email reply rules. For example, a company with an email address structure of name@example.com creates a subdomain of reply. The company adds it to the box provided onscreen to create reply.example.com.
Email Reply Address: The reply address appears in the From name of your subscriber's email client when the subscriber replies to your email. While this information appears in the format of an email message, it does not act as a valid email address on its own. The address directs the reply to Enterprise Reply Mail Management for processing. Define this address in the Enterprise Reply Mail Management feature or via a sender profile. If you use a sender profile to define the email reply address, you can enable the email message to use a multitude of email reply addresses.
DNS Record Redirect Complete: Complete a domain name system (DNS) record redirect to Engagement before activating this feature. Your ISP helps you with this process.

Enterprise Reply Mail Management includes several components used to process and act on incoming email replies: keyword lists, out-of-office terms, rules, and collections.

Keyword Lists

Keyword lists include terms used to determine how Enterprise Reply Mail Management acts on the replies. If one of the terms on the keyword list matches any of the terms, the rule to which the keyword list belongs takes the appropriate action. Enterprise Reply Mail Management reviews the message header, email Subject line, email From address, or the first 200 characters of the email body for keywords. These lists can contain terms in different languages or common misspellings of terms used to remove subscribers from a list.

Out of Office Terms

Undeliverable:
auto-response
autoresponse
automated reply
auto-submitted
auto-generated
auto-replied
inter-application
auto-reply
auto reply
autoreply
auto response
out of office
out-of-office
out of office on vacation
out on vacation
automated response
autosvar
automatisk svar
Loma
Lomalla
Automaattinen vastaus
automatic reply
delivery status notification
email is being transferred
email will not be read
for immediate help
I will respond
no longer able to receive e-mail
Notification-only
Please do not reply
abwesenheitsnotiz
absence notice
out of the office
automatica
out on vacation
out of the office on vacation
automatique
automatisk
automatiskt
autoresponder
auto-reposta
reposta
automatica
automaticka
away from the office
away from my office
Vapaalla
Poissaoloviesti
automatiresponse
do not reply to this
out on holiday
out for holidays
I am no longer with
inactive email account
inter-application message
could not be delivered
new email address
no longer able to receive email
We will respond
will reply to your email

Rules

Each rule includes a keyword list and a set of actions to take if the keyword list terms match. Each rule can take one or more of these actions:

Add email address to Global Unsubscribe List
Add email address to Master Unsubscribe List
Unsubscribe email address from publication list, including both publication lists and list unsubscribe processing
Add email address to suppression list
Add email address to any specified auto-suppression lists
Forward reply to a specified email address and select whether to use a triggered send to forward the reply
Stop processing the reply after the specified actions are taken, or delete the reply if deletion is the only action specified

Rules function in the order you arrange them within your instance. When you configure Enterprise Reply Mail Management in your account, specify whether a reply to your message generates an acknowledgment. For example, you can choose to make the system send an automated response to each email not identified by one of the reply rules. If you choose to send an automated response, select the default response or create a custom response. For example, the default response contains this text:

Example

Thank you for your email. We have received your comments/questions and we will reply as soon as possible.

**************************************************

This is an automated response. Please do not directly reply to this email.

You can also choose to use a triggered send for the reply. If you automatically forward an email message to an email address, that email address becomes the From address for the automatic reply. For example, the sales@example.com email address receives an email and that message is automatically forwarded to acruz@example.com. The automatic reply to the email sent to sales@example.com appears to send from acruz@example.com.

When you configure Enterprise Reply Mail Management in your account, you enter an email address to receive all the messages not identified by one of the reply rules. These messages forward to that routing address even if you send an automated response.

Reply mail can automatically forward to these addresses:

A user from the multi-from connect From list
A user-defined name and email address

Ensure that an email system outside your company network can reach the email address. We recommend using an email address mapped to a distribution list controlled by your email servers. Using that address permits you to update which employees receive notification without the need to change any settings.

This process updates the To information in the email header but retains the From email header information of the original message. The Enterprise Reply Mail Management system delivers the message as if it originated directly from the author of the email.

You can include the following items, but use special caution with these values:

One of these supported personalization strings:
- _RMM_Headers
- _RMM_ReplyBodyText
- _RMM_ReplyBodyHTML
- _RMM_ReplySubject
- _RMM_JobID
- _RMM_ListID
- _RMM_BatchID
- _RMM_SubscriberID
- _RMM_RecipientEmailAddress
- _RMM_RecipientSubscriberKey
AMPscript
A static name

The content of the forwarded message includes these components:

The body of the reply email.
A started or paused triggered send email. A send-time attribute called _replycontent contains the first 10,000 characters (including markup) of the body of the reply email.
An HTML email.

You can configure auto-forward information in the sender profile.

Collections

Once you have created your rules, you can bundle them together in a collection to assign to a specific send classification. All rules in the collection then apply to the send classification and any associated replies.

International Character Support

Enterprise Reply Mail Management can recognize and process double-byte Unicode characters as part of your reply rules. While Enterprise Reply Mail Management does not handle translation, you can create rules using these characters and act accordingly on any matches.