Each time you use the “Mailings” function in PowerBase to send a mass email (also known as an email blast), it’s possible that a few of the emails will bounce and not be delivered. Why does this happen, and what can you do about it? How do you find bounced emails that have put email on hold?
Why Emails Bounce
If the email bounces, it means it never reached that recipient. It can happen for a number of reasons, including the following:
1) the email address is not correct
2) the email address doesn’t work anymore or is out of commission
3) the email inbox is full and can’t accept more messages temporarily
4) the recipient has an automatic away reply message because they are on vacation or out of the office
Certain bounces are considered temporary by PowerBase. When they are temporary, PowerBase will try to send to this email address next time you send to this mailing list.
Other bounce types are considered permanent and result in the email address getting put on hold.
Bounce Types
Here’s more on bounce handling: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC42/Bounce+Handling
It’s useful as a reference for what bounce types mean. The table also shows a bounce threshold. An email will be put on hold if it bounces as many times as are shown in the threshold column. For example, an Away bounce must happen 3 times before an email is put on hold. By contrast, just one Inactive or Invalid bounce will result in the email getting put on hold.
Manage Held Emails
When emails get put on hold in PowerBase, you can decide what to do with them. You can search for all held email addresses and either 1) unhold them or 2) change/delete the emails.
- Go to Advanced Search.
- In Basic Search Criteria, click the box to search for Emails on Hold, between Preferred Communication Method and Job Title.
- This will find everyone whose email has been held. Once you have the list of contacts with held email addresses, choose the action Unhold Emails from the dropdown list and click Go. All emails will now be unheld.
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Remember: Held emails are different than unsubscribed emails. If you unhold ALL emails, don’t worry — you won’t start sending mail to unsubscribers.
Cleaning Up Invalid & Incorrect Emails
It’s not currently possible to unhold ONLY the emails that have been held for a specific bounce reason in a batch. For example, you can’t do anything with all the invalid email addresses at once. You can do them one at a time. We hope that this functionality will be developed in the future. For now, you can follow up each mailing you send out by looking at the mailing report, viewing the bounced emails, and doing clean-up of those that are “invalid” or “inactive”. For example, for a recent mailing you sent, you could remove/update the emails of those whose emails bounced according to the mail report.
As you might know, bounced emails are different than unsubscribed emails. Learn about finding unsubscribe requests here.