Use undeliverable settings to configure bounce retries and processing of undeliverable email.

Note: By default, an organization administrator cannot edit any of these settings. If you need to change these settings, contact the Support team.

Undeliverable settings are set up to clean your lists of invalid and bad email addresses. Undeliverable settings contain two groups of settings:

• Bounce retry settings
• Undeliverable processing settings

To see these settings, go to Settings > Administration > Organization settings > Undeliverable settings.

Undeliverable processing adds contacts to the suppression list. These settings can be applied on a list level or an organization level. If the setting is on the organization level, the master suppression list is normally selected.

• The Undeliverable count is the number of bounces to allow before a recipient is added to the suppression list.
• The Undeliverable range in days is the number of days that must pass before the contact is added to the suppression list. Both the consecutive bounces and the minimum number of days conditions have to be met before an email address is deemed to be undeliverable. 21 is the most common value.

Bounce retry settings

These settings determine the frequency of retrying to send the same message after it is soft bounced.

Typically, the Maximum soft bounce retries and Hours between bounce retries are set to zero. Most ISPs do not want senders to retry sending the same message after it was bounced by their systems and can damage your reputation with ISPs. Bounce retry exceptions are only for special cases.

Maximum number of days for bounce retries is 30 days. Messages are not sent after 30 days, regardless of any bounce retry settings. This setting should not be changed as is can cause severe performance issues.

If bounce retries are enabled, soft bounces do not appear in reporting until all retries are completed. A bounce does not count towards undeliverable processing until all retries are completed at which point it is counted as a single bounce.

Undeliverable processing settings

When you Enable undeliverable processing, Campaign suppresses contacts from sends when they reach the maximum number of bounces.

If this feature is enabled, use the Undeliverable rules setting to choose whether contacts should be marked as undeliverable for bounces within the same database only (list level), or added to the master suppression list, which suppresses them from any email sent from the entire organization (organization level).

By default the master suppression list is selected as the Undeliverable database/list. If the undeliverable rules are set to use "List level" this field will be blank.

The Undeliverable count (# bounces) and Undeliverable range in days settings determines the rate at which soft bounces are considered undeliverable addresses.

For example, the default settings Undeliverable count (# bounces): 3 and Undeliverable range in days: 21 means that 3 consecutive soft bounces and a minimum of 21 days must pass before an address is deemed to be an invalid address or undeliverable. Both the consecutive bounces and minimum number of days conditions must be met before an address is deemed to be undeliverable. For example, an email is sent to an address twice a week, and they soft bounce each time, that address should get more than 6 bounces before the 21 days pass.

When the Process hard bounces as undeliverable setting is 'Yes', hard bounces (also known as bad addresses) are marked as undeliverable immediately and are added to the master suppression list. They do not follow the frequency rules above.

Soft bounce retries settings

The retry is not initiated until Acoustic Campaign deliverability receives notification from the ISP that a soft bounce occurred.

Soft bounce retries have a success rate of 20%.