What is the Techmail-M utility and how can I use it?

Environment:

Techmail Utility
Oracle B2C Service

Resolution:

The techmail-M utility handles the processing of bounces that are a result of messages sent using Outreach and Feedback.   If a customer replies to a Outreach or Feedback message, that reply will be processed by techmail-M and turned into an incident.     

If techmail-M is disabled for a specific mailbox, the messages sent to the mailbox address will remain in the mailbox until techmail-M is enabled again.  Since some messages in the mailbox may have been sent some time ago, you should expect the following:

1. Any incidents created may contain questions that the customer asked days, weeks or months ago.  A report can be created to display any incidents created during a specified time frame with a source of Techmail-M so you are aware of what incidents were created.  You should consider whether or not these incidents should be answered.
     
2. Bounces will be processed normally which can result in some messages being delivered again or contact records being marked with an invalid email address.  Please refer to  Answer ID 2800: Bounced E-mail message handling in May '09 for more information on how bounces are processed.  We suggest setting BOUNCE_MAX_RETRIES to 0 before enabling techmail as this will prevent any messages from being sent again.  If you are a hosted customer, you may submit an incident to Ask Technical Support to have this done.  Once techmail has finished processing the queued messages, the configuration can be set back to its original value.  
   
   
3. Any hard bounces that are processed will result in the associated contact record being updated and the email address set to invalid.  This will not occur if the contact record has had their email address changed since the bounce message was sent.  Hard bounces are permanent problems with the email address.  Therefore, invalidating the contact should not cause concern.