Bounces and Drops and Cleaning up your Mailing Lists
When sending emails through DonorDock, you may encounter bounces that prevent a message from reaching a recipient. Knowing the difference between a soft bounce and a hard bounce will help you understand what actions to take.
Types of Bounces
Soft Bounce
A temporary issue such as:A full inbox
A server error
A firewall blocking the message
DonorDock will attempt to resend emails that soft bounce. If the retry is successful, you may see both a bounce and a delivery in the contact’s activity history.
Hard Bounce
A permanent issue that prevents delivery, often because of:An invalid or mistyped email address
A domain that does not exist
A recipient’s server that refuses the email
After a hard bounce, DonorDock will stop sending to that address. Any future attempts to email that contact will be marked as dropped.
Cleaning Up Your Email List
To keep your email list healthy, we recommend focusing first on contacts with dropped emails, since these are confirmed hard bounces that will not be retried.
How to Identify Dropped Emails in a Bulk Send
Go to the Email Statistics Page.
On the right-hand side, click View Group Email Report.
In the report, scroll to the Dropped column.
Click the filter icon (funnel symbol) and choose Is True.
This will show you all contacts who dropped due to a previous hard bounce, so you can review and update or remove invalid addresses.
Bad Email Flags
To make list cleanup easier, DonorDock now includes two automatic fields:
Bad Email
Bad Spouse Email
These toggles are set when an email or spouse’s email experiences a hard bounce or drop.
Flagged emails are automatically excluded from future emails.
If you update the email address to a valid one, the flag will reset to false.
This ensures your list stays clean and helps improve overall email deliverability.
Otto Tips
🌊 Focus on drops first: Dropped emails are guaranteed hard bounces and won’t be retried.
🐚 Keep it clean: Regularly filter your activity reports to spot invalid emails and update them.
⚓ Trust the flags: Bad Email and Bad Spouse Email fields keep bad addresses out of your sends automatically.
🦑 Update, don’t ignore: If a contact’s email changes, update their record so the flag clears and they can receive future communications.
