email bounceback tracking with personalized subjects?

Question

How do you handle email bouncebacks with personalized subjects? We send bulk emails to thousands of clients daily. Currently we run a script that combs our inbox and places all emails with the same subject into various folders that match our SQL database. This works great until a personalized email subject is sent. Because these emails all have unique subjects our script ignores these emails. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to handle this? We can't always say ignore the first part of the email because what if the personalized part comes in the middle of the subject. We thought about passing a unique code into the subject that would be hidden...but this doesn't seem to work across all email clients. Any thoughts or suggestions would be really appreciated. Thank you all!

*added so when our script runs it is done through a process that compares the subject to our database using a dictionary that looks for exact matches.

Answer 1

When the email is sent out personalized, are there phrases that you use to personalize the subject? If so, I would keep track of the outbound subject phrases and tokenize the non personalized parts of the subjects. When the message bounces back, and it matches a personalized outbound subject, you can strip out the personalized strings, and you would be left with a matching set of tokens in the subject that match your out bound subject tokens.

If the subjects are sent out automated but completely personalized with no common tokens, you can store the target address and subject on the outbound route. When you get a bounce back that is randomly personalized, you can look in the outbound storage for the same recipient, subject combination and infer that the message is a personlized subject that indeed bounced back.