Reply and Bounce Tracking

Introduction

Opens and clicks tell you who engaged. Replies and bounces tell you more: who wrote back, and which addresses do not work. BetterMerge can track both, plus send follow-ups in the same Gmail thread, through three optional mailbox features:

• Bounce detection: marks emails that could not be delivered, and stops future campaigns from emailing those addresses.
• Reply detection: marks recipients who replied, so you can see replies in your campaign report and sheet.
• Follow-up on same thread: sends a follow-up campaign as a reply in the original conversation instead of a new email.

Plan Availability

Mailbox features are available on the Plus and Pro plans. See pricing for current plans.

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Why These Features Need a Separate Setup

BetterMerge only asks Google for permission to send email. It cannot read your inbox, which is why your mailbox stays private.

Replies and bounces arrive in your inbox, though, so detecting them needs read access. Instead of asking for that access in the main app, BetterMerge uses a separate, optional script that you authorize in your own Google account. The script checks your mailbox for bounces and replies to your campaign emails and sends BetterMerge the delivery details it needs to update your reports.

You stay in control: the script runs under your own Google authorization, and you can remove it at any time from your Google account.

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How to Turn It On

Mailbox features are set up with help from our support team.

1. Open Settings → Optional features in BetterMerge. The Mailbox features section shows whether bounce detection, reply detection, and same-thread follow-ups are active for your account.
2. Click Contact support, or email support@bettermerge.com, and ask to enable mailbox features.
3. Our team will share the script and walk you through authorizing it in your Google account.

Once the script is running, the status in Settings → Optional features and in the campaign editor changes to Active. If the script stops running, for example because its authorization was removed, the status changes to Not Active.

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What You Get

Bounced Emails

When an email hard-bounces, BetterMerge:

• marks the delivery as bounced in the campaign report and in your sheet’s status column;
• counts it in the campaign’s bounce total; and
• sets the contact to Bounced, so all future campaigns skip that address. See Manage your contacts.

Temporary delivery delays are recorded as delayed rather than bounced.

Replies

When a recipient replies, BetterMerge marks their delivery as replied in the campaign report and your sheet. A reply does not unsubscribe anyone; the contact keeps receiving future campaigns unless they unsubscribe.

You can use replies in segmentation rules for follow-up campaigns, for example to follow up only with people who have not replied.

Follow-ups in the Same Thread

With same-thread follow-ups, a follow-up campaign lands as a reply under your original email. Recipients see the whole conversation in one place, which makes follow-ups feel natural and personal.

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Tips

• Check the status before an important follow-up. Make sure mailbox features show Active so reply-based segmentation uses current data.
• Keep bounced contacts suppressed. Only change a bounced contact back to a sendable status if you have fixed the address.
• Pair with email verification. On the Pro plan, email verification skips many invalid addresses before sending, and bounce detection catches the ones that still fail.