Bounces and Dead Addresses on the List

The addresses nobody is reading

A list built over five or six years is partly a list of people who have moved on: new jobs, new internet providers, closed accounts, and addresses mistyped in the first place.

Every newsletter still goes to all of them. Some of those emails come straight back as bounces. Others are accepted and sit in mailboxes nobody opens.

The email service reports the bounces after each send. Most owners glance at the open rate and close the report.

The cost is not the wasted sends. It is what the dead addresses do to delivery for everyone else.

What collects on a list

• Hard bounces, where the address or the whole domain no longer exists.
• Soft bounces from full mailboxes, busy servers or oversized messages.
• Abandoned accounts that still accept mail but are never opened.
• Work addresses of people who have since left the company.
• Typing mistakes, such as gmial for gmail, or a missing letter.
• Invented addresses typed by someone who wanted the coupon, not the email.

The third does the quiet damage. An abandoned account may accept mail for years without bouncing, so it never shows in a report, and some providers eventually reuse such addresses as traps for careless senders.

Why dead addresses hurt the live ones

Mailbox providers decide where a message goes partly by how the sender's earlier mail was received. A sender that keeps hitting addresses that do not exist looks like one that bought a list.

The likely result is the spam folder, for loyal customers as well as dead addresses. In bad cases the mail is refused outright.

Email services watch the same signal, and can pause an account whose send produced too many bounces, sometimes on the morning of a sale.

So a clean list is not housekeeping for its own sake. It is what keeps the newsletter out of the junk folder.

Reading the bounce report

Most email services split bounces into hard and soft, and give a reason for each: no such user, domain not found, mailbox full.

Hard bounces are usually dropped from future sends automatically. That protects the service's copy of the list, not your own records.

The address still sits in the spreadsheet, the point-of-sale system or the booking software it came from. The next time someone imports that spreadsheet, every dead address comes back.

So remove each hard bounce at the source too, or mark it there, so it cannot return.

A newsletter sent by blind copy from an office account has no report at all: bounces arrive as undeliverable notices and are usually deleted unread.

A worked example

A cross-country ski centre with about twenty kilometres of groomed trail collects email addresses on paper at the ticket window, through online season pass sales and from lesson bookings.

It emails only in season: a trail report most weeks from December to March, then nothing from April to November.

Last winter's first email went out after eight months of silence. A large share bounced, several pass holders found it in spam, and others phoned to ask whether the trails had opened.

The cause was ordinary. Long gaps let addresses go stale unnoticed, and the paper sign-ups had been typed in by volunteers working from handwriting.

This month, well before the first send, the centre removed every hard bounce from its pass system as well as its email service, and corrected obvious domain misspellings.

Sign-ups at the window now go through a tablet that sends a confirmation email. In October, everyone on the list whose consent is still current will get a short note asking whether they still want winter trail reports.

Soft bounces that keep happening

A soft bounce is meant to be temporary. A mailbox that is full this week may be emptied next week.

One that has been full for six sends in a row has been abandoned. Most services give up after several soft bounces; check what yours does, and remove the address yourself if it does not.

People who never open

Addresses that never bounce and never open are harder to judge. Open counts are approximate: an open is recorded when a tiny image loads, and some email programs hold back images until the reader chooses to show them.

So look at clicks and purchases as well. Someone who has not opened, clicked or bought anything in two years is probably not reading.

Send those people a short message asking whether they still want to hear from you, with one clear button. Keep those who answer, and remove the rest a few weeks later.

Permission has an expiry date

A list with no dead addresses can still hold addresses you may no longer email. Under CASL, implied consent from a sale expires two years after it, and the transition for relationships that predate the law ended on July 1.

Ask for express consent while implied consent is still valid, since an email asking for consent counts as a commercial message itself. Once it has lapsed with nothing newer, the address comes off.

Confirming new addresses

The cheapest dead address to deal with is the one that never reaches the list.

A confirmed sign-up sends an email with a link, and the address joins the list only when the link is clicked. A typo never confirms, and neither does an invented address.

CASL does not require the step, but a confirmed sign-up also leaves a dated record of consent.

At a counter, let customers type their own address, or read it back to them. Handwriting is where many dead addresses begin.

The counter-case

A list of a few hundred recent customers, built with confirmed sign-ups and emailed monthly, may lose only a handful of addresses a year. Its owner needs to read the bounce report, not start a project.

A business that sends rarely, or to a list gathered over many years, has the opposite problem. The first send after a long gap carries every address that died in the meantime.

Either way the routine is the same: remove what bounces, re-confirm what never opens, and confirm what is new.

Before the next send

1. Open the last bounce report and read the reasons.
2. Remove hard bounces at the source as well.
3. Drop repeated soft bounces after a few months.
4. Re-confirm subscribers silent for two years.
5. Ask for express consent before implied consent lapses.
6. Add a confirmation email to every sign-up form.
7. Read paper sign-ups back to the customer.

Step two is the one most often missed. An address removed only inside the email service comes back the next time someone imports the old spreadsheet.

How often to write to the addresses that remain is covered in email frequency for a business with little new to say.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.