Email bounce lists
Sometimes an email that you send from Engage can't be delivered. This is called a bounce. In the context of Engage, we are interested in two kinds of email bounces:
A hard bounce indicates that the recipient’s email address is faulty and will be permanently blocked from further communication by Engage.
A soft bounce indicates that there was a temporary issue in delivering the email to the recipient’s address. A soft bounce does not result in a permanently blocked address in Engage.
Engage doesn't retain information about historical email bounces from your current platform. Therefore it’s good practice to update Engage with those emails addresses that have hard bounced and that should not be used for sending emails from Engage. This will ensure that you don’t send to old and inactive addresses, since doing that can be devastating to your sender reputation and you risk being flagged as a spammer, which you don't want.
Updating Engage with bounced emails is done using a bounce list, a CSV file with a single row that contains the emails that the Engage customer can’t communicate with. The customer provides their Voyado team with this CSV and the Voyado team imports the file in the Engage back-office. These hard-bounced emails are then stored in the database to make sure they are never used in email send-outs from Engage.
Important
Email addresses imported via a bounce list will be blocked for future email send-outs. This applies both to contacts who currently exist in Engage with one of those email addresses, as well as any future contacts created who use one of those emails as their identifier.