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Bounced email means that the recipient’s email server returned the message to us with a note that it was undeliverable.  This “note” is called an NDR – Non-delivery report.

There are basically two types of bounces – Hard and Soft. 

  • A hard bounce is permanent – something like “mailbox no longer here”
  • A soft bounce is a temporary correctible problem – something like “mailbox full”

Gnosis marks the email addresses for which it receives “hard bounce NDR’s as “Invalid email addresses” and subsequent email runs don’t even attempt to deliver them.  For the “Soft bounce NDR’s”, Gnosis counts the number of sequential soft-bounces that an email address gets and when the address gets 6 soft bounces in succession, the email address is determined to be undeliverable and Gnosis marks the email address as undeliverable.
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You can see in the graphic above the “Invalid” checkmark (1) and the “number of soft bounces” (#rejected) for each email address, shown in the email address editor on the person form in Gnosis Pro, along with the date that the email address was last successfully used.

NOTE: You can click on the "Invalid checkmark" to toggle the email between valid (green-checkmark) and invalid (red-cross).

On this form, you can also see the current status of the email address on the SendGrid email platform (3) in each of the three suppression categories:

  • Blocked: Sending to this address is blocked as a result of past issues with emails to this address.
  • Bounce: Past sends to this address have bounced with a fixable problem (like a mailbox is full) so sending to the address has been paused for 14 days.
  • SPAM: The recipient has reported an email sent to them as SPAM, so in accordance with rules, no further emails will be sent to that address.

To re-enable an email when any of the impression settings are set, you can simply press the "Revalidate" button (2) at the end of the row.  All suppression blocks- both in Gnosis and in SendGrid will be removed.

If an email is successfully delivered to an address that has soft bounces marked against it, the soft bounce count is reset to zero and the process starts over again with the next email that is sent to that address.

Resending Email

Gnosis automatically resends to persons who did not receive the communication previously.  This is its standard mode of operation.  

You can force an email send to behave differently by checking on the “Also resent to persons sent to over ‘X’ hours ago” checkbox on the email content management form.  This will cause all persons in the target list to receive it again – even if they received it over ‘X’ hours ago.

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Another way to make persons receive duplicate copies of an email is to copy the communications item so that in effect they are receiving different emails, just with the same content.

While it is theoretically possible to resend an email to those who according to Gnosis have not opened their email, it is not a good practice as Gnosis cannot know for sure whether a person has actually opened their message and it is believed in the industry that open statistics are 20%-35% understated.

It is VERY important to remember that you do not want the recipient to flag your email as SPAM as a result of recipients receiving too many duplicates.  If you are flagged as a SPAMMER, you may be effectively shut down from sending ANY emails for a number of days while the “flags” are cleared in multiple places across the internet.  You can also get flagged as a spammer if you continue to send emails to addresses that have already been advised as invalid.  For this reason, it is very important to process reject emails soon after each major email send – and certainly prior to the next send.

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