Disable SendGrid?

Contacts Email
1

In the Send Mass Email dialog (ironically I need to send only 1), there used to be a checkbox option to Disable SendGrid.

Since we feel SendGrid’s filtering is doing us a huge disservice, is there some other place in a site’s settings’s (that I am not finding quickly enough) that I can test this theory?

Thanks,

2

Care to elaborate?

3

Inordinate number of soft bounces. The latest test soft-bounced the email verification for a new OptIn! So I couldn’t get a contact the DoubeOptIn Email Status.

As a web front-end person I’m a little light in this area but my experts tell me the email isn’t reaching our servers and SendGrid seems to be the culprit.

4

Guess my questions would be, if you care to share:

  1. Quantify “inordinate.”

  2. What kind of responses are you getting on the soft bounces?

  3. What’s your alternative? We use the Vin65 SendGrid emails for transactional emails, but fork our marketing emails out to another EMS.

5

I believe you can by pass send grid by sending an email through “send club email”. We use this feature for our club shipment notifications as we have club members who don’t want our newsletter, but want to be a club members and need to get those notifications.

You can find it by going Store - Clubs - Send Club email.

2 Likes
6

What is the other EMS you use?

Thanks by the way, you’re #3 is the best advise on the matter I’ve had.

7

We have an integration built with Campaign Monitor. Their email tools are significantly better than Vin65’s and always will be.

8

I’ve noticed recently a club member was set to 10x Soft Bounce, but if I looked at their email history they only had one, and subsequent system emails have had no issue. Then I read this:

"A contact will be 10 X Soft Bounce if:

  • 10 or more emails that have been sent to the contact have soft bounced.
  • The contact is marked as a 10 X Soft Bounce by the Clean List tool."

So, it would appear that, given these two criteria, I have to conclude that a Clean List run in the past screwed me forever for this member at this email address. Apparently SendGrid is aggregating bounce data across all clients because I only had one soft bounce. Consider also this explanation:

"Common reasons an address will soft bounce are:

  • Mailbox is full (over quota)
  • Recipient email server is down or offline.
  • Email message is too large."

All of these conditions are transient in nature, and even if the condition is corrected so that it never happens again, the email address would seem to be banished forever. (One example: They go on vacation for 2 weeks, and during that time their mailbox becomes full, and 10 SendGrid-sent emails from different clients are soft bounced. Game over if someone then does a Clean List.)

It would seem that we should rethink our use of the Clean List, if all of this is truly the case. Is it @Brent?

9

@karson, can you clarify how SendGrid/Brite Verify are working?

Do they compile one master list of email addresses and results, and if one of our contacts matches, it marks them as bounced without having actually pinged their mailbox again?

10

You should also pay special attention to all those email notifications you get back from SendGrid from bounce backs. I found two instances where Vin65 was blacklisted this week. I now read every single one and send anything I find odd to Vin65 Support.

11

@EdFarmCollective - Here’s a breakdown of how Brite Verify & SendGrid work:

Brite Verify

On the list builder results page, you’ll see a count of the contacts in that list who do not have an email status (“Blank”). Brite Verify takes those “Blank” contacts and will send requests to determine whether their email server is valid and can determine from the response if an email would be received if sent to that particular email address.

After you run the list thru Brite Verify once, all those contacts will have an email status set appropriately and shouldn’t have to be reran thru the cleaner again.

SendGrid

When using the Send Mass Email tool for marketing emails, it checks the email statuses of the contacts in your selected list. Here’s what it does:

  • Gathers the total count of “10 X Soft Bounce” & “10 X Hard Bounce” contacts
  • Gathers the total count of “Unsubscribe” contacts
  • Filters those 3 statuses out of the total list
  • Checks the new list (without bounces or unsubscribes) for a count of “Blank” contacts
  • If the list has more than 100 “Blank” contacts, you won’t be able to use SendGrid. This is where you have the option to send thru our old mail tool, but requires you agree that you understand you may be sending email to contacts who do not want to receive it.
1 Like
12

Thanks, @kelton. So…

Are the 10 X Soft Bounces limited to emails from your site or from all Vin65 sites?

Think that’s what @ElJefe was saying. If kelton@vin65.com bounced from 10 other winery sites, their status will reflect 10 X Soft Bounce in your database as well.

13

@EdFarmCollective - A contact’s email status on your site will be unique to yours. If that contact is on another winery’s site, they are not linked and won’t share the same email status.

@ElJefe - Also, to follow up on a question you had above, 10 X Soft Bounce could actually be 1 email sent to a contact that during its 72 hour retry period soft bounces back 10 times or more. This is something that the team agrees should change as a contact shouldn’t be punished for their email server potentially just being down for 3 days.

The team is working on better solutions for this to increase the usability of our email tools, hang tight!

5 Likes
14

@kelton - I have had a different experience than you suggest above regarding the 10X Soft Bounce. I manually added a contact. In <5 minutes, I cleaned a list she was in, <5 minutes later I check her status and it is 10X SoftBounce. So within 10 minutes of clock time a completely new contact was soft bounced? How could that be? See the contact D. Sz. for the example.

15

According to the docs, if you Clean SendGrid can decide to use what it knows to set your contact to a bounce status. See my post above in this thread.

16

@Lise - What @ElJefe mentioned is correct.

Brite Verify receives a number of different statuses back when verifying if an email address is ok. Here’s today’s logic:

  • If status equals valid or accept_all, we mark the email status as “Cleaned”
  • If status equals unknown, we mark the email status as “10 X Soft Bounce”
  • If status equals invalid, we mark the email status as “2 X Hard Bounce”

Like I mentioned previously, we are aware the Soft Bounce implemenation is not the greatest, and the team is working on better solutions for this.

1 Like
17

Dude, that’s a bad implementation. Straight up.

18

@EdFarmCollective - When this was first built, it made sense (and still holds some ground). We based this initial decision off of Brite Verify’s explaination, which you can view here: http://docs.briteverify.com/status-key/

UNKNOWN

The email address looks good but the associated domain is not responding. This could be a temporary status for domains having intermittent issues or a permanent issue for dying domains. There will be some bounces from the Unknown category so consider the following before mailing:

If your ESP’s bounce threshold is 5% or less: DO NOT MAIL.
If your ESP has given you a dedicated IP: MAIL SLOWLY.

19

Could you create a contact status of “Unknown” that expires every 30 days?

1 Like
20

Wondering if SendGrid was a bad choice. It did solve the problem of email timing but so many marketing and mail list management issues seem to be causing problems. Is it time to look at MailChimp or one of the other service providers to get us out of these issues? It would also be great to have a more marketing friendly option integrated where you have templates, easy template creation and editing, better testing, email timing, etc.