Bounces and unsubscribes

Most mailings generate bounced emails. In addition, if your mailing was sent with tracking turned off, your recipients requesting to be unsubscribed will have replied via email rather than clicking a link.

To handle these bounces and unsubscribes automatically:

1. Click Set Up Accounts on the Send tab
2. Select the default account and click Properties
3. Click the Track tab
4. Under POP server, make sure your POP server name, login and password are filled in
5. Click OK
6. Click Close
7. Click Bounces and Unsubscribes on the Reports tab

The Bounces and Unsubscribes feature connects to your POP (inbound mail) server and downloads all your email. It then extracts the first email address from each message in our mailbox. It automatically places a check mark by addresses from messages which seem to be bounces or unsubscribe requests, then presents you with the entire list of addresses along with sender and subject for your confirmation. Note that messages which do not contain email addresses are not shown in the list.

Confirm the contacts you want to unsubscribe by checking or clearing the check box by each address. Then click Unsubscribe to mark these contacts as unsubscribed. The contacts are marked as unsubscribed and will not be sent mailings in the future. Note: They are not deleted from your database.

Soft vs. hard bounces

Soft bounces are emails returned for temporary reasons, e.g. a full mailbox. These addresses generally need not be unsubscribed or deleted from the list.

Hard bounces are emails returned for permanent reasons, e.g. the address no longer exists. These addresses should be unsubscribed or deleted from the list.

Select messages

• Click the Select button
• From the menu, choose the kind of message you want to act upon

Unsubscribe recipients

Click the Unsubscribe button to unsubscribe the selected recipients from the list. By default, recipients are unsubscribed from all lists. This is recommended to reduce spam complaints.

You can also unsubscribe recipients only from individual lists.

Delete messages

Click the Delete button to delete the selected messages from the mailbox on the mail server. This command only deletes messages with a check mark by them. It does not delete messages without a check mark or messages which were not listed because they do not contain an email address.

Read messages

To read the original message from which an email address was extracted, double-click on the address.

Separating bounces from unsubscribes

In most cases, you don’t need to separate bounces from unsubscribes, because both need to be removed from your list. However, if you want to separate bounces from unsubscribes, do the following.

Before sending mailing

1. Click Set Up Accounts on the Send tab
2. Type a reply address that's different from the sender address
3. Send your mailing

Most human replies will go to the reply address, while automatic bounces will go to the sender address. The mailbox processed by Bounces and Unsubscribes is whichever one you enter in the Set Up Accounts dialog, Send tab, under POP server.

Note: Some older email programs do not support the reply address feature. Therefore, some human replies may go to the sender address instead.