Suppression & Bounce

Understanding email suppression and bounce handling.

Quotient uses a combination of user-submitted manual suppression and bounce detection to manage email suppression lists.

When an email address is added to a business's suppression list, Quotient will automatically suppress the email address from receiving email campaigns.

Manual Suppression

A Quotient user can manually suppress an email address via the manuallySuppressed field when uploading an email list. Please see the building-email-list guide for more information.

Bounces

An email "bounces" when it is not delivered to the inbox of the recipient, or if the email is rejected by the recipient's email provider. If your Quotient account has a large number of bounces, this can negatively impact deliverability.

In order improve deliverability, Quotient monitors and detects email bounces for all emails sent via Quotient.

Bounce Types and Detection

Quotient monitors and detects email bounces for all emails sent via Quotient. There are two types of bounces and a number of subtypes:

• Hard Bounce: A hard bounce is a permanent failure to deliver an email.
  • General: The email provider sent a hard bounce message
  • Domain Does Not Exist: The email address domain does not exist
  • User Does Not Exist: The email address user does not exist
  • Blocked: Your domain is blocked by the recipient's email provider
• Soft Bounce: A soft bounce is a temporary failure to deliver an email.
  • General: The email provider sent a general bounce message, in which case the email address may not bounce again in the future
  • Mailbox Full: The recipient's mailbox is full
  • Message Length & Size: The message is too long or to large
  • Rate Limited: The provider is receiving too many emails within a given time period and is temporarily rejecting new ones
  • Content: The content of the message is rejected by the recipient's email provider for spam reasons
  • Sender Reputation: The provider determines your domain has poor sender reputation
  • DNS Issues: Temporary DNS failures or routing problems

Email addresses that receive Hard Bounces are automatically suppressed and will not receive any emails. These email addresses are added to Quotient's global suppression list, which is used for all email campaigns across all businesses. This ensures that emails are not sent to email addresses that are known to bounce.

Email addresses that receive Soft Bounces are not suppressed until they exceed our soft bounce occurence threshold of 7 for a given business. At that point, they are added to the business's suppression list.

Suppression Lists

Quotient maintains a global suppression list for hard bounces. This means that once an email address is suppressed due to bouncing, it will remain suppressed for all email campaigns across all businesses, ensuring that emails are not sent to email addresses that are known to bounce.

Quotient also maintains a business-specific suppression list for soft bounces and manually suppressed emails. This means that once an email address is suppressed due to bouncing or manual suppression, it will remain suppressed for the duration of the business's Quotient account.