Why hard bounce when didn't previously

I have a member who hasn’t been receiving emails but she used to. I can see that the last 3 emails hard bounced but prior to that they didn’t. She has had the same email address for years.

A hard bounce means the email address doesn’t exist anymore. Did the customer close their account? You shouldn’t send to a hard bounce addresses, it can affect your deliverability.

Can you send an email to the address from another system, such as gmail or Office365? Maybe you have a small typo in the address?

Here’s some more information about Bounces from the folks who run the email servers for Vin65.

Curious to what her email domain address is.

OK, I have a club member with an aol.com address. Same story: it worked, and then for whatever reason sendgrid decided it was a hard bounce.

I have been attempting to resend. The member states that they have whitelisted our sending address.

Can anybody tell me what to do to fix this? @carisenr ?

Thanks, Jeff! I thought I was crazy. I might still be but I"m glad someone
else had this issue.

I note that curiously I am getting no bounce messages like I do with other bouncing emails.

Is there any way we can get insight via SendGrid tools? I think deliverability of emails is a huge issue!!! I have a wine club member who doesn’t receive any of my emails via Vin65 (and she’s a techie, so she knows where to look for them)–and she’s listed as deliverable (i.e., no soft or hard bounces). And while she’s the only one I know of, who knows how many others there are!

I think deliverability (either known or unknown) is a huge issue! We need to have greater insight. Whether that’s through SendGrid or wherever.

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Co-sign. @Vin65, if you guys want to be serious about email, you need to get serious about email.

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We have moved on to a third party EMS because of this. While management here considers it temporary until vin65 sorts this out, I’m not looking back.

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@ElJefe - One particular thing I have noticed with AOL emails is that they are very sensitive with spam reporting. If one of your contact places an email into their spam folder, AOL is going to tell sendgrid that the email was marked as spam. Here’s SendGrid’s doc on spam reports: https://sendgrid.com/docs/Glossary/spam_reports.html

If you have cleared out the contact’s email status and attempted to resend, and it keeps marking them as hard bounce, feel free to send an example over to support@vin65.com. To get details on the issue from SendGrid we need to know within a few days of when the send was attempted and failed.

And then what is Vin65 doing with that?

SendGrid will prevent emails from going to addresses that have reported a sender as spam. If we know that those addresses marked the email as spam accidentally, we can have SendGrid remove the spam report.

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Thanks, I emailed support with the offending address. It’s good to know something may be able to be done.

Just by the way, this whole situation is a GREAT argument in favor of being able to have a second email address on an account. Just saying.

They’re doing this.

My heart is now really all a-flutter!

I sent an email to a new club member, and the email hard bounced. Confusingly, the email also shows as having been opened by the customer. Has anyone else seen this? I confirmed the email address is correct with the customer.

Edit: As I review my customers with “hard bounces,” it appears this is the case for multiple customers.

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