KlickTipp differentiates between manual and automatic spam complaints.
Global Bounce Management: Protect Sender Reputation
Want to improve the deliverability of your emails? Discover everything you need to know about global bounce management. Optimize your email campaigns and boost delivery rates with KlickTipp.
This article offers practical tips for managing bounces, avoiding incorrect email addresses, and making the most of KlickTipp's automatic bounce handling.
Purpose of Global Bounce Management
Internet service providers (ISPs) require email senders to avoid sending emails to inactive addresses, as undeliverable emails place unnecessary strain on ISP server capacity.
As stated in Gmail’s Bulk Senders Guidelines:
To help ensure that your messages aren't flagged as spam, we also recommend that you automatically unsubscribe users whose addresses bounce multiple pieces of mail.
Yahoo! Mail is even more explicit in its Best Practices for Senders than Gmail:
Monitor hard and soft bounces as well as inactive recipients. Persistent emails to these addresses are a surefire way to get your connections deferred.
Microsoft states in its Postmaster Policies, Procedures, and Guidelines:
According to Microsoft’s Postmaster Policies, Procedures, and Guidelines, after receiving a numerical SMTP error response code between 500 and 599 (also known as a Non-Delivery Response, or NDR), the sender should not attempt to resend the message.
Similarly, German internet service providers also discourage sending emails to inactive addresses. For instance, web.de’s email sending guidelines recommend:
The sender must immediately remove e-mail addresses from their mailing lists if hard bounces occur after sending to these addresses. If delivery attempts are made to numerous unknown (or meanwhile deactivated) WEB.DE accounts, a temporary block will be imposed. In such cases, we also reserve the right to block accounts permanently
All internet service providers agree: repeatedly sending emails to inactive addresses puts you at risk of being blocked. Often, the block is temporary at first, but in the worst case, you could be added to a blacklist. If that happens, the internet service provider will stop delivering your emails to users.
To avoid this, KlickTipp offers fully automated global bounce management. This ensures that you don’t accidentally send emails to inactive addresses repeatedly.
Sending an email to an inactive address triggers a Non-Delivery Notification (NDN). KlickTipp receives and processes this notification to determine whether it’s a hard bounce, a soft bounce, or a spam complaint. In this section, we’ll explain these terms in more detail so you understand what they mean. We’ll also show how our system responds to the different feedback from internet service providers.
Thanks to our bounce management, you don’t need to worry about a thing! KlickTipp automatically ensures that your contact list stays clean in the background. We’ve developed this feature to meet the exact requirements of internet service providers, which helps ensure that they reward our efforts with excellent delivery rates.
Hard Bounce
If a subscriber deletes their registered email address, KlickTipp will get a non-delivery notification when you send to it. This notification shows that the email address no longer exists. KlickTipp will then mark the address as “Hard Bounce” right away and add it to the global exclusion list.
KlickTipp automatically removes email addresses with hard bounces from the mailing list after each send. However, these addresses remain in the Contact Cloud, marked as hard bounces. This policy applies to all our customers and their emails.
Our global bounce management ensures that inactive email addresses are only contacted once. This system-wide approach contributes to achieving excellent delivery rates from email service providers.
Soft Bounce
A soft bounce occurs when an email cannot be delivered due to a temporary issue, such as a full inbox or a server being unavailable.
Good to Know
If there is a soft bounce, KlickTipp will exclude the email address from sending for two weeks.
After this period, KlickTipp will automatically remove the soft bounce status, allowing you to resend emails to that address.
Spam Complaints
Automatic Spam Complaint
The email service provider determines that your email is spam and rejects it. KlickTipp receives an NDN (Non-Delivery Notification) message with the status “spam complaint”.
Did You Know?
KlickTipp blocks email addresses that have received the status “spam complaint” as a result of an automatic spam complaint.
This applies for a period of two weeks. This block only applies to the KlickTipp user account in which the email that led to the spam complaint was sent.
After the blocking period has expired, KlickTipp automatically removes the “spam complaint” status. During this time, this email address cannot receive any emails.
If an automated spam complaint is triggered, the Internet service provider may block your email before it even has a chance to reach the recipient’s inbox. To avoid this and ensure successful delivery, it’s crucial to maintain a low spam score, follow GDPR-compliant email marketing practices, and consistently engage in best practices for email deliverability.
Manual Spam Complaint
A manual spam complaint occurs when a recipient actively marks your email as spam or junk, reporting it directly to their email service provider or through platforms like KlickTipp.
Important to Know
When a manual spam complaint is made, the email address is flagged with the status “Spam complaint” and subsequently removed from your ContactCloud.
This means you will no longer be able to send emails to that address.
The sum of spam complaints must not exceed 0.1 percent. This figure refers to the e-mails sent. We may not receive more than ten spam complaints per 10,000 emails.