Understanding the Email Subscribers Lifecycle

Overview of Email-Related Events

Batch applies a series of rules designed to preserve your sender reputation, help with list hygiene, and comply with your obligations as a sender.

During the lifecycle of a subscriber, several events can occur:

• Bounces: Feedback Batch receives from mailbox providers indicating that an email couldn't be delivered

• Spam complaints: Feedback Batch receives from mailbox providers when recipients mark an email as spam

• Unsubscribes: Requests coming from unsubscribe mechanisms available in your email (unsubscribe link or unsubscribe button in the app or webmail).

All these events are logged and displayed in your campaigns/automations statistics. They can be exported using the Profiles API export capabilities:

Bounces

Email messages transit from the Mail Transfer Agent server (Batch) to the mailbox provider's servers (e.g., Gmail) using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).

When an error occurs, the mailbox provider returns a bounce message with additional details explaining why the email couldn't be delivered.

There are three common categories of bounces:

→ Soft Bounces

Soft bounces are temporary delivery failures that can happen for various reasons:

• Misconfigured/unreachable inbound server

• Inbox full (or over quota)

• 24 hours of failed delivery due to rate limiting

• And more

→ Hard Bounces

Hard bounces are permanent delivery failures. Batch receives hard bounces in cases of:

• Invalid email addresses (mistyped or nonexistent)

• Deleted or deactivated email accounts

• Domains that no longer exist

• Blocked sending domains due to invalid or inactive email addresses

→ Block Bounces

A block bounce occurs when an email server refuses to accept the message due to policy or reputation issues. This is usually caused by:

• Poor sender reputation

• IP address or domain blacklisting

• Content identified as spam

• Authentication failures (missing or incorrect SPF, DKIM, or DMARC records)

• Rate limiting (sending too many emails too quickly)

• Policy blocks (the receiving server has specific rules against your type of email)

User Interactions

Batch also processes automatically negative user interactions to protect your domain reputation and exclude these recipients from future emails.

Here is an overview of the existing flows:

→ Spam Complaints

Batch automatically processes negative user interactions to protect your domain reputation and exclude affected recipients from future emails.

A spam complaint occurs when email recipients mark a message as spam in their email client. Recipients may flag emails as spam based on their personal judgment of the content, frequency, or relevance of the messages they receive. Batch receives the email addresses tied to spam complaints through inbox providers' feedback loops (see more here).

→ Unsubscribes

Recipients can unsubscribe in two ways:

• By clicking the unsubscribe link included in marketing communications

• By clicking the unsubscribe button in their email client (which triggers a "list-unsubscribe")