Common Reasons for Bounce-Backs or Returned Emails
Sometimes when you do an email broadcast, you might receive a Bounce Back message indicating that the mail was not delivered.
When this happens you will be sent a bounce back message which will have certain details explaining why the email did not get sent successfully. In most cases bounce backs are in non-technical language and you will be able to understand it. Any e-mail address consists of two sections. The username part and the domain name part. The username is the part in front of the “@” sign and the domain name is the part after the “@” sign.The email address you are sending to is referred to as the recipient, the person sending the email is the sender.
If you find that your follow up email or your email broadcasts are being "bounced back" it could be that your domain has been blacklisted. This often happens with AOL when people mistakenly flag legitimate mail as Spam in their AOL client or it can be indicating that your mail server is being used by spammers.
You should check your Mail Server for Open Relay. If you leave your mail server as an Open Relay, it can be used as a gateway for spammers.You should always enable some kind of authentication on your mail servers. (POP or SMTP auth is usually sufficient)
To find out how to remove your mail server from the AOL blacklist (and get yourself on their whitelist) check out http://postmaster.aol.com/
Here are some things to look at in regards to bounce-backs:
1. Look at some of the bounce back emails in your inbox- what is the email address of the intended recipient?
2. Is it a valid email address?
3. What is the content of the message back from the ISP? Does it tell you why email bounced?
4. How many emails did you send out? Ie: If this was an ALL MEmbers email, approximately how many active members do you have?
5. How many emails bounced back? As a percentage of ALL emails sent, is this more than 20%? If yes then perhaps there is an issue at InTouch but if it is less than 20% then it means 80% of emails reached the intended recipient.
6. To correct bounce-backs, look up that lead or member in your InTouch Follow-Up application and correct the email address, remove it or unsubscribe it so no further email attempts are made.