Bounces and Drops and Cleaning up your Mailing Lists
When sending email through DonorDock, some messages may not be successfully delivered.
Understanding the difference between a bounce and a drop can help you determine whether an address may work again or whether the contact information needs updating.
Types of Bounces
A bounce occurs when the recipient's email server cannot successfully accept the message.
Bounces generally fall into two categories.
Soft Bounce
A soft bounce is usually caused by a temporary delivery problem.
Examples may include:
A full mailbox
A temporary email server issue
A firewall or filtering problem
Another temporary delivery restriction
DonorDock may attempt to send the email again after a soft bounce.
If a later attempt succeeds, you may see both a bounce and a delivery associated with the email activity.
Hard Bounce
A hard bounce indicates a permanent delivery problem.
Common causes include:
An invalid email address
A mistyped email address
A domain that does not exist
A recipient's email server permanently refusing the address
After a hard bounce, DonorDock will no longer attempt to send future marketing emails to that email address.
View the Reason for a Bounce or Drop
Additional delivery information may be available on the individual email activity.
You can review bounce and drop details from:
The email activity on the contact's timeline
The individual activity on the Sent Email Summary Page
The Reason column of a Group Email Activity Report or other applicable Activity Report
The information returned depends on what the recipient's email server provides.
Identify Dropped Emails from a Bulk Send
Use the Group Email Activity Report to identify contacts whose emails were dropped.
Navigate to Outreach > Emails.
Select the Sent tab.
Click the subject line of the email to open the Sent Email Summary Page.
Click View Group Email Report.
Locate the Dropped column.
Click the filter icon for the column.
Filter for Is True.
The report will display email activities that were dropped because of a previous permanent delivery failure.
Use this information to review and update the affected contact records.
Bad Email and Bad Spouse Email Flags
DonorDock automatically maintains two fields to help identify addresses with known delivery problems:
Bad Email
Bad Spouse Email
These fields may be set when the applicable email address experiences a hard bounce or drop.
When an address is flagged:
DonorDock automatically excludes the bad address from future email sends.
Your team can identify the contact as having an invalid or undeliverable address.
The flag will reset if the email address is updated to a new value.
For example, if jane@oldaddress.org hard bounces and Jane later provides jane@newaddress.org, updating the contact's email address resets the Bad Email flag for the new address.
Cleaning Up Your Mailing List
When reviewing email deliverability, we recommend focusing first on Bad Email addresses.
Bad emails indicate that DonorDock already has a known permanent delivery failure for the address.
When you identify one:
Review the contact record for obvious spelling errors.
Update the email address if the contact has provided a new one.
Avoid repeatedly re-entering an address that has already hard bounced unless you have confirmed that it is correct and active.
Continue reviewing future email results for additional delivery issues.
Keeping invalid addresses out of your active mailing lists helps reduce failed sends and protects your organization's email sending reputation.