News
 Reclaim
Bad Addresses—Carefully
By Stefan Pollard, senior strategic consultant,
ClickZ
As a professional e-mailer, you know conventional
e-mail procedure dictates that whenever a message
hard-bounces, you immediately remove the address
associated with it and never use it again. Over
time, that adds up to a lot of bad addresses and a
lot of time and money spent acquiring them.
This may surprise you: all those addresses aren't
necessarily bad. If you review the error messages
that accompany the bounces, you'll likely find some
bounces result from a temporary problem. If you can
resolve the problem, you may be able to safely
reclaim the address.
The error code, identified by a number and found in
the text that accompanies each bounce message,
specifies why a message couldn't be delivered. Some
messages hard-bounce due to irresolvable issues,
such as a bad address or domain or a closed account.
Others soft-bounce due to temporary account or
technical issues. These error messages often contain
a description (or link to the definition) that
explains more fully why the e-mail bounced.
How do you know whether the e-mail message from a
brand-new opt-in bounced because the address was bad
or due to a blocking issue? Sometimes you don't. The
wisest course is to withdraw any hard-bouncing
address from your active list before your next
mailing. (Your list software should do that for you
automatically.) But you don't necessarily have to
remove it permanently.
Some marketers are taking a radical step. They're
trying to reclaim as many addresses as they can by
periodically e-mailing them and returning any good
addresses to the main database. This is a bad idea.
If you send to nonexistent addresses already
identified to you by the ISP (true hard bounces) you
can end up being blocked as a spammer.
Instead,
remove bad addresses as usual and add them to a
bad-address database. Be sure to keep the full error
codes so you can inspect them for errors that aren't
the result of invalid accounts. Reclaim only
addresses that resulted from a blocking issue that's
been resolved.
But beware: recovering bad addresses is like
defusing a bomb. You must proceed carefully and
identify the right addresses to reclaim, or risk
blowing up your whole e-mail program.
What to Look For
Now that you have the list of hard bounces with the
error codes, read past the 500-number reason code to
the problem's text description.
True hard bounces are messages that can't be
delivered because of irresolvable issues, such as:
• Unknown user
• Bad (misspelled) domain
• Address error
• Closed account
These are the addresses you must promptly remove
from your active database. If you continue to send
to them, the ISP will likely flag you as a spammer.
In contrast, here's a sample error code for a hard
bounce due to a blocking issue (e-mail address
changed to protect the innocent):
recipient@aol.com, Invalid Address, Final-Recipient:
rfc822;recipient@aol.com Action: failed Status:
5.0.0 (permanent failure) Diagnostic-Code: smtp;
5.1.0 - Unknown address error 554-': (HVU:B1)
http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/554hvub1.html
12TRANSACTION FAILED' (delivery attempts: 0)
In this case, you can follow the URL to the ISP and
attempt to resolve the blocking issue. Once you've
resolved the block, you should be able to reclaim
the e-mail address and send to it again. Notice the
e-mail address is valid, but something else in the
sending caused the bounce.
Test Only Resolved Addresses
The watchword here is "small." Don't try to save
time by e-mailing to your entire bad-address
database. Instead, create a sublist of only
addresses with resolved sending problems.
Next, come up with your text message. This shouldn't
contain the same content you send to the active
list. Create a lightweight text message to avoid
potential HTML and preview-pane issues, indicate the
problem and invite the recipient to update her
address or unsubscribe. Remember, the recipient may
not have heard from you in a while and may need to
be reminded why she's suddenly receiving e-mail from
you again.
Send as usual, but watch sender logs carefully.
Immediately dump all bounces. Return the good
addresses to your database, but continue to watch
sender logs.
Reduce Hard Bounces in the Beginning
• Switch to a double opt-in subscription process, in
which the subscriber has to reply to a confirmation
e-mail before her address goes into your database.
This is still the best way to avoid hard bounces
based on misspelled user or domain names. It also
helps reduce spam complaints and addition of
spam-trap addresses to your list, the top reasons
ISPs block senders.
• Request a backup e-mail address, postal address,
or phone number at registration. Contact your
subscriber via an alternate channel if her address
goes bad.
For further reading on hard and soft bounces and
what those error codes mean, check out "Enhanced
Mail System Status Codes." Your overworked IT people
will thank you for it, and you may actually
understand what they're talking about next time the
subject comes up.
You invested a lot of time and money to acquire your
e-mail addresses. Take a little more time to reclaim
them the right way.
---Source:
ClickZ August 30, 2006 (www.clickz.com). As senior
strategic consultant, Stefan Pollard is responsible
for guiding Responsys clients in developing e-mail
marketing and lifecycle messaging strategies to
increase clients' ROI.
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