High bounce and mail blocks

This alert tells you that an IP address has generated a high percentage of bounces at one or more domains.

Try to keep your total bounce rate under 2% so that deliverability issues do not occur. Hard bounces are email addresses that couldn't be delivered to for permanent reasons such as:

• Recipient email address does not exist
• Domain does not exist
• Recipient's email server has blocked delivery of emails

Hard bounces are permanent failures and that need to be removed from your data, except for bounces due to blocks. Those exceptions can be sent again, if appropriate, when the reason for the block is resolved.

Soft bounces are email addresses that are valid and the email message reached the recipient's mail server. However, the email bounced back because of either of the following reasons:

• The recipient's mailbox was full
• The server was down
• The recipient's email server is throttling or temporarily refusing email, either due to a lack of resources or a temporary block due to sending IP/domain reputation concerns
• The message was too large for the recipient's inbox

Acoustic Campaign will attempt to resend soft bounces between 24-72 hours depending on the domain, unless Bounce Retries are turned on and then we will honor those settings. These settings can be found under Settings > Organization Settings > Undeliverable Settings and must be turned on by contacting Support.

Mail Blocks

Check for mail blocks. Mail blocks are provided on the top domains report. From there, change the one drop down to '25 domains' and the other drop down from 'Delivery' to 'Performance'.

These bounces can be found in the single mailing report.

This report can be accessed by going to:

1. Reports > Other Reports > Single Mailing Report.
2. Locate and click Mailing Name.

After you have clicked the mailing name, you will see the Mailing report tab and the Top domains report tab.

The Mailing Report tab includes both hard and soft bounces.

Top Domains Report tab includes the following information:

Domains	Monitor	Sent	Sent%	Gross Bounced	Bounced%	Received
Received%	Unique Abuse	Abuse%	Gross Blocked	Blocked%	Gross Restricted	Restricted%

To export this data from the single mailing report:

1. In top right corner, click Export Tracking Data.
2. On next screen, select both Soft Bounces and Hard Bounces.
3. Click Continue twice and then click Export Results.
4. After the Data Job is complete, go to Resources > Stored Files > Export Files folder.
5. Click the check box next to File and Download.

High bounce categories

Poor list quality can cause high bounce rates due to bad mailboxes or bad domains. Consider sending a confirmation email or moving to double-opt-in to reduce bad addresses.

What triggers this alert?

Some bounce categories clearly explain the reason for the bounce while other categories will require additional data to provide a more concise explanation for the bounce. Create a support case and include the following information:

• Date the email was sent
• The problem ISP
• VMTA/IP address used in the email

We will pull the logs and provide that information and provide solutions to reduce or eliminate those bounces.

The following list shows the bounce categories and their definitions:

Bad configuration
Email bounced due to a configuration issue on the sending mta.

Bad connection
The connection between our mail server and the receiving mail server could not be properly established.

Bad domain
A misspelled domain, a domain with no MX records or a domain that does not exist.

Bad mailbox
Recipient's mailbox at the receiving mail server no longer exists.

Content related
Receiving mail server did not approve of the content of the email.

Inactive mailbox
Recipient's mailbox was inactive/disabled at the time the send was attempted.

Message expired
Email message expired in queue on the sending mail server prior to being delivered to the receiving mail server.

No answer from host
Sending mail server was unable to establish any connection with the receiving mail server.

Policy related
Email was refused due to a local policy violation and/or your from domain was not in a list of allowed recipients on the receiving mail server. Also included here are bad mailbox error messages and spam content messages that are incorrectly formatted by the receiving server.

Protocol errors
Receiving server suspected that the email(s) contained bad syntax and/or certain authentication protocols were not identified during the transit of the message.

Quota issues
Recipient or local level email quotas were exceeded at the time of send.

Relaying issues
Email bounced due to the sending email server being identified as an open relay.

Routing errors
Email bounced due to firewall and/or router issues on the receiving email server's end.

Spam related
Email bounced due to the receiving email server suspecting that the email content contains spam-like characteristics.

Virus related
Receiving mail server suspects that the email sent contain malicious code.

Other bounce types could not be properly classified into any of the above categories.

SNDS

The SNDS alert tells you that an IP address has generated a high percentage of bounces at one or more domains. Find this report by going to Settings > Activity reports > Deliverability dashboard.

Where do I go to see these bounces?

We have included the bounce categories (bounce cats) to give you a better understanding of what happened with your email(s). Receiving servers (Yahoo.com) provide messages to the delivering server and we put those messages into similar groups.

What do I do now?

If the cause of the high bounce rate was due to bad mailboxes or bad domains that is a function of your list quality. Consider sending a confirmation email or moving to double-opt-in to reduce bad addresses.

Some bounce cats clearly explain the reason for the bounce while other categories will require additional data to provide a more concise explanation for the bounce. Create a Deliverability case and include the date sent, the problem ISP along with the VMTA/IP address used in the email. We will pull the logs and provide that information and provide solutions to reduce or eliminate those bounces.

IP warming completed

This alert informs clients that they have completed the IP warming process.

This means you no longer need to segment mail going to all domains with the exception of AOL. It is possible that you are sending to your entire list but still need to segment AOL until you are whitelisted at AOL.