Managing Bounced Emails in Seatrobot
Seatrobot has a comprehensive approach to handling emails that bounce. It is based on the principle that because Seatrobot is the entity sending emails on behalf of multiple organizations, it is vital that it can send as many emails as possible to as many different recipients with maximum success. To achieve this, Seatrobot must strictly adhere to the national (US) and international regulations (e.g. the CANSPAM Act) and all recommended industry guidelines to prevent spam, and to prevent bad email addresses from being repeatedly sent to.
(For Seatrobot's systems for allowing and managing recipient unsubscribes, see 'Unsubscribes')
At the same time, one of Seatrobot's key differences for its users is the visibility and control it offers over all aspects of managing an event and the individual guests you invite.
Our bounce handling systems have therefore been implemented so that we minimize bad and bounced emails, while giving you the user the tools you need to see what your contact email issues might be and fix them wherever possible.
Permissions
All contact information you upload into Seatrobot must have the explicit permission of the contact to agree that you may send them emails about your events. All recipients of any email sent via Seatrobot have the option to unsubscribe either from any further communication about that specific event, or from all further emails from your organization. Once a contact has unsubscribed from your organization you cannot email them again through Seatrobot unless they re-subscribe (see 'Unsubscribes').
Additionally, you may not use your Seatrobot account to send general marketing / advertising emails to your contacts. All communications sent to your contacts via Seatrobot should refer to an event or events you are managing using Seatrobot.
Bounce-Types and Bounce Rules
Seatrobot uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its email send provider. For every email sent through Seatrobot, we receive a confirmation of send from AWS. For any email that bounces, we receive an explanation of the reason for the bounce. There are a number of reasons an email may bounce. These reasons are split into two main categories: Permanent Bounces and Temporary Bounces.
Permanent Bounces
These include:
bounces due to expired, bad or unreachable email addresses, or
emails belonging to a domain (organization) which has specifically blocked emails from your organization.
Seatrobot immediately declines the invite for these bounces in an event and marks the contacts as 'Permanent'. Once marked as Permanent these email addresses cannot be added to future events unless the email address is changed.
Temporary (transient) Bounces
These have bounced usually because:
there is some temporary issue with the recipient's mail box (it's full, the message was too large, attachments were not accepted etc.),
email addresses that have been suppressed by Amazon for bouncing too many times in the past, or
some other temporary technical reason why the recipient could not receive the email at that time.
Seatrobot continues to email these contacts, but creates a 'bounce count' for them, and increments that bounce count each time an email bounces in this manner.
If any email address generates three Temporary Bounces within a ninety (90) day period, Seatrobot will put them on temporary hold and refuse to send an email to them for ninety days. After this ninety day period, their bounce count is re-set to zero.
Each day Seatrobot checks every contact’s status and re-sets the Temporary Bounce count to zero for any contacts whose last Temporary Bounce was greater than ninety days in the past and who are not on a temporary hold.
For a full table of different bounce-types and Seatrobot's response to them, click here.
Seeing Bounces
Any time an email you send bounces, that information is visible to you, both in the specific event and at your general Contacts page. Additionally, certain areas also provide information on the reason for the bounce and what you can do about it. Bounces are tracked and visible in the following places:
Guest List
The main event-level area for tracking and managing bounces is Guest List. When you first load the page, only the confirmed and declined guests are displayed. Clicking the Status Filter button shows a dropdown list of all other guest types, including a detailed list of all the different bounce-types. Clicking any of those bounce-types displays the bounced invitees of that type. Clicking the 'View All Bounces' filter displays all the bounced invitees, regardless of bounce type.
When you filter by any bounced emails, they display along with a button with the bounce-type in their row. Mousing over the bounce-type button displays the general reason for the bounce:
Clicking the button displays the full meta-data we received when the email bounced. This can be very helpful in figuring out whether the issue was to do with the address, or the email was blocked etc.
Action You Can Take
If you believe that an email you sent was blocked by the recipient company and should not have been, you can contact their IT department to ask them to add your company's domain to their 'white list' of allowed senders.
Note: sometimes if you send an invite to very large contact lists - and especially if the list includes multiple recipients from the same organization - their email security systems will mark many or all of your emails as spam and impose a temporary block. We recommend that you split your email sends into smaller groups for maximum effectiveness.
Fixing A Bad Address
If you think that an email bounced because the address was incorrect and you think you know the correct address, you can edit the email right there in Guest List and re-send the invite to the new address.
To do this, click the First Name of the bounced individual to open up their Edit panel. Change their email address and click ‘Save & re-Send Email’.
Contacts Section
All bounced email are tracked in detail in the Contacts section. You can filter your contacts by bounce type using the 'Status Filter' dropdown:
Clicking any of these bounce types will display all contacts in your database with that status.
Clicking on the first name of any contact will open their personal Contact Details Page where you can see when they bounced and the specific details of the bounce. There, you can also mark a contact as 'Do Not Email' (applies to all future events) and view the details of when and at which event they unsubscribed and manage a possible re-subscribe process.
The export button on the Contacts page exports the current contacts view - so you can filter by bounce type and then export the list if required.
To mark a contact as 'Do Not Email', first select the checkbox at the start of their row, then click the Status Filter dropdown and select 'Mark as Do Not Email'. Contacts marked in this way cannot be added to invites for any event.