When you're working in Agillic, it's required that you make sure you have valid email addresses for your recipients. If the emails you send to your recipients bounce, the recipient's Person Data is changed and they may stop receiving your emails until you change their email address.
Hard Bounces and Soft Bounces are registered as a Fixed Person Data and in Email reports.
In this article you can find information about:
- What's a 'Bounce'?
- What Happens in Agillic When a Recipient Bounces
- Valid Recipient Hard Bounces
- Resetting an Email Address
What's a 'Bounce'?
Soft Bounce and Hard Bounce is a way of letting you know if a recipient's email inbox is temporarily or permanently unavailable.
The recipient's email host controls whether their inbox can receive the emails you send. If the email client registers the inbox as temporarily or permanently unavailable, the email client will signal this back to Agillic email servers. Then, the system automatically registers the type of bounce in the Fixed Person Data field.
Soft Bounces
Think of Soft Bounces as situations where the email server indicates to us that we may be able to deliver to the requested address at some point in the future. Soft Bounces cover situations such as:
- Temporarily unavailable inbox
- Inbox is over allowed quota
- Service is temporarily unavailable
- The email is too large to be received
Hard Bounces
Think of Hard Bounces as situations where the email server indicates to us that we will never be able to deliver to the requested address. Hard Bounces cover situations such as:
- Email address is not registered with the email provider
- The domain is not a real domain
- The recipient's email client won't accept emails.
What Happens in Agillic When a Recipient Bounces?
The reaction for a bounce depends on what kind of bounce the recipient's email client signals to our email server.
Soft Bounces
As Soft Bounces indicate that the email inbox is only temporarily unavailable, Agillic will still try to send email communication to the recipient until the limit is reached. The following changes happen to the recipient if an email soft bounces:
- The Person Data SOFT_BOUNCE increments by 1
If a recipient soft bounces 1.000 times it will result in the following:
- The Person Data VALID_EMAIL is set to False
Hard Bounces
As Hard Bounces indicate that you will never be able to deliver an email to the recipient, Agillic won't attempt to send any email communications until after our email servers receive an indication of a hard bounce from the recipient's email client. The following changes happen to the recipient if an email hard bounces:
- The Person Data HARD_BOUNCE increments by 1
- The Person Data VALID_EMAIL is set to False
When a recipient's Person Data is set to VALID_EMAIL = False, it will block the recipient from getting any further emails from Agillic.
Valid Recipient Hard Bounces
Occasionally, it happens that valid recipient's who have always been able to receive your email communication Hard Bounce. The reasons why a valid recipient can Hard Bounce is:
- The email is denied by a firewall or a filter on the recipient's computer or email client
- The email client is blocking your emails
If you're sure that the recipient is a valid recipient, you can try to clear the Fixed Person Data fields HARD_BOUNCE and VALID_EMAIL. If you then try to send an email to the recipient, you should be able to deliver the email to the inbox unless the email client indicates a hard bounce again.
Resetting an Email Address
You may be in a situation where you need to reset the Person Data fields as, for example, a recipient contacts your customer service department and asks why they don't receive emails from you. As the bounces are related to the email address, they are reset if the email address is changed for a recipient.
The complete list of changes are:
- The Person Data SOFT_BOUNCE is cleared
- The Person Data HARD_BOUNCE is cleared
- The Person Data INACTIVE_EMAIL is cleared
- The Person Data VALID_EMAIL is cleared
- The Person Data MALFORMED_EMAIL is cleared
You can learn more about how valid recipients are measured here.