CiviCRM Spark - managing bounces

Question

I have the basic CiviCRM Spark installation, and am planning to use it to send out bulk emails to about 1200 recipients. How do I set up Spark to track bounces? The extension "Fetch Bounces" under System Settings is greyed out and I'm not able to enable it. The service advertises that bounce tracking is possible, but I'm not finding any Spark specific user guidance.

Answer 1

CiviCRM Spark uses a third-party provider for email delivery. This ensures that we have working bounce processing for the emails being sent, and also that we receive spam complaints (when people click "this is spam", it sends a notification to the hosting provider, but not as a typical bounce).

Until recently CiviCRM Spark had a different setup and we had been in the middle of migrating to the new provider (currently Sparkpost, the similar name is just a coincidence). The setup is now being rolled out.

Therefore, it is not necessary to setup the bounce processing job. Sparkpost notifies us about bounces and spam using a different mechanism (webhooks), which is automatically setup on CiviCRM Spark.

There is a catch: to comply with anti-spam best practices, we can only send domains using a domain that has been validated (technically: a domain with the correct DKIM key on the DNS). Since CiviCRM Spark aims to be a low-cost and easy to use service, we currently only support emails sent from @notification.civimail.org. There is more information about this now displayed in the page about the "From Email Addresses".

Until now, CiviCRM Spark had a default configuration, but did not enforce which domains were used. This often meant that emails were being sent, but the recipient's email providers often classified the emails as spam.