One of the built-in functions of eNews Builder’s email system is a Bounce Manager feature that excludes active subscribers who are identified as undeliverable from future email jobs. The Bounce Manager identifies emails that are returned without delivery for reasons such as full mailboxes, people on vacation, bad addresses, or for unknown reasons.  In this article, we'll get into a little more detail about some of the bounces in the bad address category, including why they are excluded even if you don't remove them and how to find and manage them.

Not all "bad addresses" are excluded. 

The term “bad address” may actually indicate one of several scenarios and depending on the situation, they may or may not be excluded from future mailings, as described below. 

·        The most common bad address is when the domain portion of the email was valid but an email server in that domain responded to our attempt to send by saying, in effect, "there's no such address here."  
·        Another scenario is that the domain itself doesn’t seem to exist, or can't be reached. 
·        A third possibility is that there does not appear to be a mail server in the domain.

These last two bounce categories are potentially temporary conditions and these subscribers will not be excluded from future emails. However, once the Bounce Manager processes a “No User” bounce, as in the first case, it updates that record in your account's subscriber database and it will exclude these subscribers from future mail jobs.

A subscriber record may also be excluded if an "administrative address" is imported via a file upload and import. These administrative emails have addresses that begin like root@, postmaster@, and administrator@. These addresses are excluded by default because only very rarely are these kinds of addresses used for receiving messages.  More often they are simply used for administrative purposes.  Messages sent to them, in particular non-system related messages, are treated as abuse by most ISPs and networks and the managers of these domains will typically blacklist the source. These addresses are excluded by default to prevent this. If you are certain this is the address you should be sending to, you can re-activate the address after it is imported.

If you regularly use the Bounce Manager interface to clean your list of bounces, you may not see many of these exclusions when sending emails out. But keep in mind, bounced subscribers with “bad addresses” are still considered to be “active” subscribers until you take some sort of action to remove them, with either the Bounce Manager or with the “Search and Manage” option using the process described below.

How do I find all these excluded “bad addresses”?

To find excluded bad addresses, go to the "Search and Manage" interface on the main Subscriber Menu. There, under the "Select subscribers that" portion of the screen, you can keep the default of “all active subscribers” in the “are found in” field or you can use any of the other search criteria to select the subscribers you want to find excluded addresses for.  Once you have your criteria selected, go to the  "And is" dropdown menu that defaults to "Active, not removed.”  Change this option to "Marked as undeliverable." By choosing this option, you will be able to find any of the “bad address” emails in your subscriber base.  Farther down, under the "And then" portion of the screen, you can select the radio button option designating what you wish to do with these subscribers. Initially, you may want to select to "View them," but eventually, once you've looked them over, you may want to "Permanently delete from all lists, but remember as opted out."  By choosing this option, the names will still be in your database, but they will no longer be considered “active” and they will be excluded from your future mailings.

But I know this one address is good – what now?

In a few extremely rare cases, good email addresses may be excluded because of a rare mis-configuration on the recipient’s mail server.  If this should occur, you can  "unexclude" an address in the system by searching for the address (either in the "Search and Manage" interface, or in the "Quick Tasks" area on the main Subscriber Menu), and edit that subscriber's properties and then save them. Once a subscriber record is re-saved, this will remove the exclusion on this address so that the system will try it again with any new information you may have provided.