Manage Bounces

When email delivery fails, mailbox providers send bounce code responses. The system categorizes and tracks these bounce codes so that it can suppress email addresses when they fail, such as when a recipient's address is invalid or their mailbox is full.

When an email address hard bounces, our system suppresses it after the first failure. When an address soft bounces, the system suppresses it after it fails the number of times you specify under Communication, Bounces, Parameters.

To alert you when it’s time to follow up with a user for their current email address, you can set the number of soft failures to allow before our system suppresses them.

Note: To ensure a positive sender reputation, our system automatically suppresses email addresses that return hard bounces from future mailings after the first failure.

From Core, Communication, Bounces, select Parameters and enter the maximum number. After an email address returns the number of soft failures you enter, it’s marked “bad” in the Bounces list.

After you confirm an email address is valid or receive a current address from a user, you can remove the bounced address from the suppression list in one of these ways:

  • From Core, Communication, Bounces, select the highlighted check under Bad or enter the new address under Email.

  • From Core, use the People finder to search for and open the user’s profile. Under Contact Card, Digital, select Edit and update the address under Email. Also, remove the selection for Bad Email and then select Save.

  • From Core, System tools, Data refresh a data manager can import a file to quickly update the email addresses and clear the Bad Email field for existing users.

To understand why messages to an email address failed delivery, you can view the bounce details. From Core, Communication, Bounces, select the number under Bounces for the email address to review. From the list, you can view when messages failed delivery, whether they were permanent failures, the type of message, and why they failed.