Bounced Contacts

Bounced Contacts are those for whom the email address on file has been determined to be undeliverable. Paminga filters bounced Contacts out of future mailings automatically to help protect your send reputation.

Hard Bounces vs. Soft Bounces

Not every bounce means the address is bad, so Paminga treats the two kinds differently:

• Hard bounce – a permanent failure, such as an address that does not exist. A hard bounce marks the Contact bounced immediately, and they stop receiving email.
• Soft bounce – a temporary failure, such as a full mailbox or a receiving server that is temporarily blocking mail. A soft bounce is recorded on the Contact's Activity Stream, but it does not mark the Contact bounced. They stay mailable, and the next send may well get through.

That default keeps one bad afternoon at a recipient's mail server from permanently cutting a Contact off. If you would rather stop mailing addresses that keep soft bouncing, turn on Mark Contacts Bounced After Repeated Soft Bounces in your Automation Settings. A Contact who soft bounces your chosen number of times within your chosen number of days is then marked bounced, the same as a hard bounce.

Unbounce a Contact

Unlike unsubscribes, bounce status is not as cut and dry as a contact requesting to no longer be contacted. Bounces can occur for many reasons, some of which may be resolved, making the recipient eligible to receive communications once more.

In Paminga, unbouncing a Contact is easy:

Navigate to the Contact Details page. On the right hand side of the contact details you will see an option for "Mailable Status". Dropping this option down will provide you with the contacts bounce status, as well as the date and time in which the contact bounced as well as the reason for the bouce.

If the Contact’s email address is set to “Bounced”, you’ll now see a button that allows you to reset the Contact’s bounced status. This button is labeled "Unbouce This Contact".

Click this button and confirm via the pop-up that you want to unbounce the Contact.

If the Contact was marked bounced by the repeated soft bounce setting, unbouncing them restarts the count: only soft bounces after the unbounce count toward marking them bounced again.

Mass Unbounce Contacts

If you have more than a few Contacts who you wish to unbounce it can be more efficient to leverage a .CSV file to reset their status via a CSV Upload.

Your .CSV will need to have two columns:

• Contact ID (As an alternative, you may use “Email” instead)
• Bounced Contact

The Contact ID or Email column will be used to specify which contact file you are updating. The Bounced Contact column should contain the value “False” for each contact you wish to unbounce.

Once the .CSV is uploaded the all contacts bounced status on the file will be reset.