The Sporty platform makes it easy to send emails and eNewsletters to individuals and to groups of people. There are a number of areas of the Sporty platform that enable you to send emails, including:
- e-Newsletter builder
- emails from SuperCRM
- invitation to re-register (magic link method)
- invitation to re-register (SuperCRM)
Sometimes your email will bounce for an individual because the person's email address is no longer valid, or they may have an issue with their own mail system. If the error is temporary, the system will automatically retry to deliver the email for you, but if the error is permanent (for example, when the person's email address is no longer valid), then your email will never be received.
Temporary vs. Permanent error
- Temporary error: The system will automatically retry to deliver the email
- Permanent error: The email address you are trying to send the email to is not a current address, or there is a typo/spelling error. The email will not be sent. You will need to update the email address.
In those instances, the invalid email address will automatically be added to an exclusion list to prevent it from being used again in your future emails, since it is considered poor practice to continue sending email to addresses that are known to be invalid (and doing so can harm the reputation of the sending mail server).
If an email you send through the Sporty platform does bounce, the recipient's own email server will send back an email to let you know it has bounced. This return email gets sent to whatever From address your original email came from. Sporty lets you set the From address to ensure you get these bounced email notifications when they occur. For example:
Whenever an email does bounce back to you, it should include an error code sent from the recipient mail server. A list of the error codes and what they mean is included below, or click here.
Note that a bounced email does not relate to instances where the email address is still valid and the person simply happens to have set an auto-reply message to let people know they are out of the office.
IMPORTANT: It can you take some time and effort to identify a correct email address for a person after the email you sent them has bounced. However, it is important for you to proactively manage your bounced emails to maintain the quality of your database.
Bounced emails displayed via the SuperCRM
Sporty makes it easy to identify which email addresses have bounced with a permanent error. These are displayed in the main SuperCRM grid view with the email address in a red font.
SuperCRM also lets you filter just these invalid email addresses to help you proactively manage improving your database. You can achieve this by using SuperCRM to add a filter against one of your forms/databases, then tick the checkbox to display records with Bounced Email (see image below).
Once you have identified those emails which bounced, you can then export the list to a CSV file (Excel) or work your way through the list on screen to update each record accordingly.
Email Error Codes
The notification email that is sent back to the 'From Address' email will contain an error code as to why the email bounced back. The list of error codes are:
Message Rejected
The message was rejected by recipient’s mail server.
- 1002-1003 Your message was rejected because it was associated with a blacklist
- 1004 Your message was rejected due to its content
- 1006 Too many connections in a period of time
- 1007 A virus was detected in your message
- 1011 Challenge responses requests
- 1999 Your message was rejected for a reason not specified above
Permanent Failures
A recipient’s address was found to be invalid.
- 2001 The email address is invalid
- 2002 The domain of the email address is invalid
- 2003 The email address is not in a valid format
- 2004 The email address is no longer valid
- 2999 The email address was rejected for a reason not specified above
Temporary Failures
Delivery to the recipient’s address is temporarily unavailable.
- 3001 The recipient's mailbox is full or over quota
- 3002 Recipient email account is inactive/disabled
- 3003 Recipient’s server continuously asked us to 'try later'
- 3999 The email address was rejected for a reason not specified above
Communication Failures
System, network or protocol errors preventing delivery.
- 4001 Recipient’s server too busy
- 4002 Protocol error, invalid command or timeout
- 4003 Unable to connect to recipient's mail server
- 4004 Recipient’s server rejected message as too old
- 4006 Your message was rejected because the receiving server is not accepting mail for the destination domain
- 4999 A system, network or protocol error prevented the delivery of your message for a reason not specified above
Informational
Informational, we received a reply of the following type.
- 5001 Out of office / Auto-reply
- 5999 An informational message was received other than for a reason specified above
Unknown or Suppressed
Indicates that no other failure codes were encountered.
- 9999 Sending to this email address has been permanently suppressed due to either a previous permanent failure to deliver email to this address or due to the recipient having clicked a button or link to designate your email as junk. We recommend removing the email address from your recipient list.