Bursted Report - Can I find Delivery Failures?

[Lynn]

We have a report that bursts by email to a large number of recipients. The email that is set up for the production service account user that executes the burst is a non-monitored "do not reply" email account.

When a "real" user bursts the report they would receive a bounce back email for any recipient that couldn't be delivered, but with the service account we don't get these. Does the content store record this? I'm thinking it wouldn't because it is the mail server doing delivery.

Thought I'd ask in case anyone has a suggestion on how to find out delivery failures.

[calson33]

hmmm... I might be missing something here, but why not monitor the email account?  :-\

EDIT: I am pretty sure that most email servers can route emails to other inboxes, so have your admins temporarily route anything that is sent to the "do not reply" email to another inbox.

[Lynn]

It is a "do not reply" email address similar to what you might get from a retailer when you order something. 

It is specifically set up to not accept mail. Anyone attempting to send to it will get a bounce back. The bounce is intentional so the recipient realizes their response didn't go anywhere. Hopefully this prompts the recipient to read the email and follow the instructions on how to respond.

In our situation the burst goes to sales people who are required to review their attached content and provide information to another person within a set period of time. Of course many claim they never got the email as their excuse for not complying. The 'do not reply' email was implemented because they kept doing "reply" on the email rather than reading the instructions in the body of the email.

Dealing with sales people is somewhat worse than trying to herd cats and geese.

[calson33]

"Dealing with sales people is somewhat worse than trying to herd cats and geese."

Oh, I hear that!

I am pretty sure most email servers are capable of keeping logs of things like that (I know newer versions of Exchange do). You might not get the content of those emails, but you should see routing information.

[Lynn]

Thanks calson. I will see if the admins can pursue via the mail server logs. Makes sense that Cognos would just be passing it off for the mail server to deal with. The company uses Lotus Notes which is a whole different pile of fun.

[RKMI]

Hi Lynn,

I don't know, if this would help or add to the confusing of a brusted report. There is a something in event studio called as approval request under tasks followed by the burst report execution task.  I have never used it, but my theory is that if you set up and event to run a burst user by a user then ask for can approval request to send to the  region sales manager that way they remain accountable to read the message. And if they do something stupid by replying back to do not reply user the manager ask them if they read the insturctions in the email.  :P

Yes, I know crazy and no I'm not smoking a magical pipe like the "MAD Hatter"  ;D

Anyways just a thought incase you want to invest time in that.

Thanks,
RK

[Lynn]

I will look into that! Thanks very much!!

[RKMI]

Np Cheers, enjoy the long weekend.  ;D