If a recipient replies to a campaign that you've sent out, the replies are automatically stored in the report for that campaign. You can access and read replies by selecting Replies under the Interaction section of a campaign's report.

You can set a reply-to address at a campaign or from address level, so that any replies you receive are sent directly to an inbox of your choice, enabling you to easily manage two-way communication with your contacts.

You also have the option to have replies automatically forwarded to an email address of your choice. This can be done when creating a new campaign, or editing an existing one by selecting the first step, Create.

Things you need to know:

You can use contact data fields to get replies sent or forwarded to a different address depending on the contact.

For example, this could be used to send replies to a contact's account manager. To do this, enter the contact data field placeholder, for example, @ACCOUNTMANAGEREMAIL@, as the reply-to address.

The system analyses all replies and filters them into three groups:

These are actual replies sent to you, perhaps asking a particular question. These replies can be sent or forwarded to an email address of your choice, as specified in the campaign setup screen.

These are automatic replies set by the email recipient to go to every email they receive. This is quite common in relation to general email addresses such as info@ or sales@.

If the system identifies a reply as an automatic reply, then it isn't forwarded to the forwarding email address specified in the campaign setup screen. We can’t however prevent auto replies from being sent to your custom reply-to address.

These are replies sent by sender verification tools such as Spam Arrest. They're sent to reduce spam in the email recipient's inbox. You generally need to enter a code of some description in order for your original email to be accepted by your email recipient.

Again, if the system identifies a reply as a challenge reply, then it isn’t forwarded to the forwarding email address specified in the campaign setup screen, but is still sent to your custom reply-to address.

To make sure that all replies to your campaigns are tracked correctly, we use a unique reply address for each contact, which looks something like re-6G7-VAX-39BM-BZVXK@yourfromdomain.com.

In addition, you can set a custom reply-to address. This both gives a more friendly appearance to your reply address, and allows you to easily manage two-way communications with your contacts. The custom reply-to can be set for each campaign individually as you create it, or you can set a custom reply-to for each custom from address (CFA) you have in your account.

If tracked replies aren't important to you, then Track all replies can be disabled in the settings for the from address. When disabled, the unique reply address is no longer applied, and replies aren't tracked; they’re instead forwarded to your Unknown mail forward address, provided this has been set up, as well as sent to your custom reply-to address, if set.

If someone directly emails your from address - from Outlook, for instance - their email is also forwarded to your Unknown mail forward address.

When a contact sends an email directly to your custom from address, or replies to a transactional email, their message is sent to the email address in the Unknown mail forward field.

The reply looks like this in your inbox:
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Clear the Track all replies check box to disable the advanced reply tracking.

Replies to campaigns sent using this from address are sent to the address you enter here, directly from the recipient address, enabling simple two-way communication with your contacts. It makes sense to use an email address for an inbox that you or your colleagues can easily monitor.

Select this option to apply your custom reply-to address to all existing unsent standard campaigns, as well as any ongoing sends of triggered campaigns, which use this from address. This does not apply to already sent campaigns, or campaigns currently sending.

Enabling this setting means that any child accounts you have can have additional custom from addresses using this same domain.

Attachments to replies are sent on to your custom reply-to address, if you have set one.

Attachments to replies are not sent to a forwarding address. To allow attachments to be sent to a forwarding address, and appear in the replies report in Dotdigital, you must enable attachment forwarding.

To do this:

Forwarded attachments can be any of the following file types: .csv, .doc, .docx, .dot, .eps, .gif, .html, .ical, .ics, .indd, .jpg, .mp3, .pdf, .png, .pps, .ppsx, .ppt, .pptx, .pub, .rtf, .txt, .vcf, .vcs, .xls, .xlsx, .xps