A recipient may be blocked because of a series of changes in their Fixed Person Data. A blocked recipient can't receive emails, even if you add the recipient to a Flow execution with an Email step.
If you create a report on a send out where you include a blocked recipient, the recipient will show up as 'Error'.
In this article, you will find out:
- Reasons Why a Recipient Is Blocked
- Target Groups for Valid Email Recipients
- Target Groups for Valid SMS Recipients
Reasons Why a Recipient Is Blocked
You can find the reasons for Agillic blocking a recipient in the below table.
| Reason | Description | Fixed Person Data | Other Actions | Communications blocked if the value of Fixed Person Data is |
| Soft Bounce | The recipient is blocked if marked with 1,000 soft bounces | SOFT_BOUNCE | SOFT_BOUNCE is incremented by 1 | False |
| Hard Bounce | The recipient is blocked if marked with 1 hard bounce | HARD_BOUNCE | HARD_BOUNCE is incremented by 1 | False |
| Unsubscribing | Using the standard Unsubscribe event or the List-Unsubscribe feature | UNSUBSCRIBED | UNSUBSCRIBED_DATE is set to the time of unsubscribing | True |
| Having a malformed email address | Affected by invalid top-level domains (.com) Checked when an email address is created or changed |
MALFORMED_EMAIL | - | True |
| Marking an email as spam | The recipient is blocked if email client notify Agillic of the spam report | COMPLAINT | COMPLAINT_DATE is set to the time of complaining | True |
| Not opening emails | Recipients are blocked not opening emails within a specified time period. Learn more about inactive email here. | INACTIVE_EMAIL | - | (True) If enabled in System Settings |
| Having an invalid phone number | If a Recipient has a malformed mobile number, this Fixed Person Data will be set to 'Invalid' | MSISDN_TYPE | - | Invalid |
| Not sent because the email address is invalid | Note that if a recipient's email address is invalid due to a non-existing domain name, VALID_EMAIL is not set to False until after a small period of time. | VALID_EMAIL | False (But only after a period of time) |
Table 1: The different scenarios where a recipient can be blocked
If you add a new email address to a recipient, the following Fixed Person Data fields will reset:
- INACTIVE_EMAIL
- VALID_EMAIL
- HARD_BOUNCE
- MALFORMED_EMAIL
COMPLAINT is not reset with an email address change and should be manually reset with the recipient's approval.
If you add a new mobile number to your recipient, the following Fixed Person Data will re-evaluate:
- MSISDN_TYPE
Target Groups for Valid Email Recipients
Agillic considers a recipient valid to receive emails when matching the following Fixed Person Data conditions:
- Person Data - VALID_EMAIL - equals - False - Condition Not met
- Person Data - UNSUBSCRIBED - equals - True - Condition Not met
- Person Data - MALFORMED_EMAIL - equals - True - Condition Not met
- Person Data - COMPLAINT - equals - True - Condition Not met
- Person Data - INACTIVE_EMAIL - equals - True - Condition Not met
It's important to note that the check on INACTIVE_EMAIL is off by default. However, you can turn it on in the System Settings in the 'Email' subsection. Learn more about inactive emails here.
Target Groups for Valid SMS Recipients
As Agillic is currently not receiving feedback on the validity of each phone number, there is only a single check to make on the recipient:
- Person Data - MSISDN_TYPE - equals - Invalid - Condition not met
Suggested Next Steps
- Understanding How Valid Recipients are Measured
- Understanding Inactive emails
- All You Need to Know About Conditions
- All You Need to Know About Target Groups