Process bounces from Gmail in phpList

In this article I’ll go over how you can process your phpList bounces when you are using a Gmail account as your bounce address.

If you’ve ready my previous article on handling bounces with phpList, that covers how you can use phpList to process bounce-back messages for the mailings you’ve been sending out via phpList.

That works perfectly fine if you’re simply using an email address such as [email protected] on your own server. However if you happen to be trying to use Gmail as your bounce processing email address, this requires some additional manual modifications in order for phpList to be able to successfully connect to Gmail’s servers.

Modify phpList files to connect to Gmail

In order to correctly connect to Gmail’s servers the following files need to be modified. I would recommend taking a look at our guide on how do I edit a file on my server if you are unsure how to navigate to these files to modify them.

/config/config.php

$message_envelope = ‘[email protected]’;
$bounce_protocol = ‘pop’;

$bounce_mailbox_host = ‘pop.gmail.com’;
$bounce_mailbox_user = ‘[email protected]’;
$bounce_mailbox_password = ‘PassWord’;

Then you need to make sure that the following line:

$bounce_mailbox_port = “110/pop3”;

Gets updated to:

$bounce_mailbox_port = “995/pop3/ssl“;

/admin/processbounces.php

This bit of code:

function processPop ($server,$user,$password) {
$port = $GLOBALS[“bounce_mailbox_port”];
if (!$port) {
$port = ‘110/pop3/notls’;
}

Needs to be updated to:

function processPop ($server,$user,$password) {
$port = $GLOBALS[“bounce_mailbox_port”];
#if (!$port) {
#$port = ‘110/pop3/notls’;
$port = ‘995/pop3/ssl’;
#}

You should now understand how you can configure phpList so that it can process bounces for you from a Gmail account.