This article contains the following topics (click on them to jump to the corresponding place):
- Email Status and Reputation
- Blocks / Bounce Management
- Find out the causes of bounces
- Remove permanently blocked contacts
- What is an email sender reputation?
Email Status and Reputation
What does email status mean?
When you send an email newsletter, your email server provider sends it to the recipient's email provider. Normally the provider receives this email and stores it in the recipient's inbox. In certain circumstances, however, your email cannot be delivered. In this case, the recipient's email address is blocked. Quentn uses the error code to identify the cause of the block and categorises the addresses as temporary or permanent blocks.
There are 9 statuses on Quentn:
- Unknown contacts have a grey background.
- Contacts confirmed by double opt-in have a green background.
- All confirmed contacts have a blue background: confirmed (single opt-in), confirmed (manual), conformed (imported).
- Unsubscribed contacts have an orange background.
- Blocked contacts have a red background: spam, blocked and temporarily blocked
Blocks / Bounce Management
A temporary block (soft bounce) occurs, for example, when:
- The recipient's inbox is full.
- The email provider was not available at the time of sending, e.g. due to maintenance work
If the email cannot be delivered the first time, Quentn will unblock the email address after 72 hours. Be aware, however, that the time span increases with each additional block (up to 75 days)! After five temporary blocks, the email address will be permanently blocked.
A permanent block (hard bounce) means that the contact can never be contacted again. It occurs, for example, when:
- The email address is wrong - either because there is typo in the email address, or because the recipient has deleted this email address.
- There is something wrong with the domain (the one behind the @) - again, a typo may be the cause of this.
- The email is rejected due to suspected spam.
- The sender domain is rejected because of a bad reputation.
Your email is categorised as spam if:
- A bad user interaction with the web mailer has been recorded. This means that the recipient has already received emails from you in the past, but ignored them or moved them to the spam folder.
- Certain words or phrases are present in the sender address, subject line or even in the email itself, such as "limited offer", "access now", "click here", etc.
- There is an accumulation of more than one strong punctuation mark in a row (!!! or ???).
- Several words or sentences are written in capitals
- Your sender address has a negative reputation.
Find out the causes of bounces
If you want to find out what caused a block, click on the email status of the contact in the contact overview.
A window will open where you can view the email status history. For blocks, the reason for them is also given (e.g. the contact unsubscribed, email blocked by the server, etc.). You can also view the complete sever message.
Remove permanently blocked contacts
You can remove contacts that have been permanently blocked from your list. To do so, go to your contacts overview and filter your contacts by email status. You can then delete the results.
What is an email sender reputation?
An email sender reputation is a rating based on a score given by an internet service provider (ISP) to an organisation that sends emails. The score represents the ranking of your IP address compared to others - the score is crucial for the deliverability of your email! The higher the score, the more likely it is that emails will reach the recipients. If the score falls, the emails are sent to the recipient's spam folder or rejected beforehand.
The following factors influence the score:
- The number of emails sent by the company
- How many recipients have marked the company's emails as spam
- Whether the company is on any blacklists
- How often the emails cannot be delivered, e.g. because they are sent to unknown users
- How many recipients open, reply, forward, delete or click on links in the email
- How many recipients unsubscribe from the list
Quentn helps you to achieve a good score. The addresses for which the emails could not be delivered are automatically blocked (temporarily). This way, you avoid sending emails to inactive addresses over and over again.