Email Deliverability & List Health
Maintaining a healthy email list improves deliverability, reduces failed sends, and ensures your organization respects each contact's communication preferences.
DonorDock provides tools to help you identify addresses that can no longer receive email, review bounce and drop information, and manage contacts who no longer want to receive marketing communication.
This section covers two important areas of email list health:
Bounces, Drops, and Cleaning Up Your Mailing List explains what happens when an email cannot be delivered and how DonorDock helps identify invalid addresses.
Managing Email Unsubscribes and Communication Preferences explains the difference between Do Not Solicit, Unsubscribed, and Marketing List opt-outs.
Monitor Bounces and Drops
When an email cannot be delivered, DonorDock may record the result as a bounce.
Some bounces are temporary, while others indicate the address can no longer receive email.
After a permanent delivery failure, DonorDock prevents future sends to that address and records those attempts as Dropped.
DonorDock also uses Bad Email and Bad Spouse Email fields to automatically identify email addresses with known delivery problems.
Regularly reviewing these records can help your organization:
Identify invalid or outdated addresses
Correct contact information when a new email address is available
Reduce repeated attempts to undeliverable addresses
Maintain a healthier marketing list
Improve overall email deliverability
Respect Communication Preferences
Email list health is not only about whether an email address works. It also includes respecting whether a contact wants to receive your communication.
DonorDock includes several fields related to communication preferences:
Field | Purpose |
|---|---|
Do Not Solicit | Identifies contacts who have asked not to be included in solicitation efforts |
Unsubscribed | Prevents a contact from receiving bulk marketing emails through DonorDock |
Marketing List Opt-Out | Allows a contact to unsubscribe from selected Marketing Lists while remaining subscribed to other marketing communication |
SMS Unsubscribed | Prevents a contact from receiving text messages through DonorDock |
These settings do not all behave the same way.
For example, Do Not Solicit is primarily used for reporting and segmentation and does not technically prevent an email from being sent. Unsubscribed, however, prevents bulk marketing emails from being delivered to that contact.
Maintaining a Healthy Email List
We recommend regularly reviewing both delivery results and communication preferences.
A healthy list should:
Exclude addresses with permanent delivery failures.
Keep contact email addresses up to date.
Respect contacts who unsubscribe from marketing communication.
Use Do Not Solicit when building fundraising and solicitation audiences.
Review bounce, drop, and unsubscribe activity after major email sends.
Use clicks, conversions, and other engagement information when evaluating whether your email audience remains active.
Keeping your recipient data current helps protect your organization's sending reputation and provides a better experience for the people receiving your communication.