Manage Email Bounces Proactively
AOL and other Internet Service Providers reluctantly accept that they have to pay for mail servers and postmasters to handle delivery of your bulk email to their customers. But they hate with a passion when you waste their time and money by sending bulk email to addresses at their domains which are invalid. In fact, AOL and other Internet Service Providers defend themselves from abuse by blacklisting bulk mailers that send email to a disproportionately high percentage of invalid addresses.
To help you avoid that unpleasant situation, most Internet Service Providers are kind enough to send you a notice, called a "bounce," when one of your emails was undeliverable. There are two categories of bounces: hard and soft.
- A hard bounce occurs when an email address is no longer valid (usually because the user canceled his account or changed employers)
- A soft bounce occurs when delivery to an email address is temporarily unavailable (usually because the user's mailbox was full or his Internet Service Provider had a temporary outage)
Internet Service Providers have a justifiably low tolerance for bulk mailers that persist in sending email to addresses that hard bounce. So, don't do that.
You'd also be wise to conditionally remove email addresses from your mailing list that soft bounce three times in a row. Later, you can re-try those email addresses to see if any become deliverable again. For bonus points, conditionally remove subscribers from your mailing list that haven't viewed any emails for the past few months or haven't clicked on a link within the past 6-12 months. Later, you can re-try those subscribers to see if any have become responsive.
Note: In an ironic twist for non-profits with large mailing lists, the only thing worse than receiving a lot of hard bounces from a domain is receiving no bounces at all. If you receive 0 bounces, the worst case scenario is that all your mail to that domain is being thrown out prior to delivery, rather than returned.
|
