Email Bounce Handling and Suppression

Email bounce events

When an email fails to deliver to a recipient’s inbox, Airship will report that failure via the Compliance Stream and internal reporting. Emails can bounce for a variety of reasons, which Airship will consider either a “soft” or “hard” bounce.

Airship distinguishes between hard and soft bounces with a bounce_class. Hard bounces are represented in events with bounce_class values of 10, 30, or 90. When a hard bounce response is received, an email address is considered to be permanently undeliverable. All other classes of bounce are considered soft bounces and delivery will continue to be attempted for future messages. In order to protect your sending reputation, email addresses that receive a hard bounce will be “suppressed” from future messaging.

Email suppression

Suppression acts as a failsafe to prevent accidental sends to addresses that may pose a risk to either sending reputation or to legal compliance. Airship tracks a suppression state per channel, in addition to transactional and commercial opt-in status. To be eligible to receive email messages, an address must be both opted-in and not suppressed for the type of messaging being sent.

For example, when a recipient marks a message as spam, a suppression state of spam_complaint is added to the channel. While suppressed, the email address will not receive any messaging, regardless of their opt-in state. If an audience list is later uploaded that updates the opt-in status of the email address, Airship will continue to honor the suppression state and will continue to not send any messages to the address.

Suppression types

An email channel can have one of four suppression state values. Depending on the value, the suppression state can function as either a full or partial block.

• bounce — A hard bounce response was received. The address is considered undeliverable, and continuing to send to it could hurt the sender’s reputation. No future messages will be sent to the email address.

• spam_complaint — A recipient marked a Transactional EmailAn email sent in response to a user’s interaction with your app or website — receipts, shipping notifications, password reset notifications, etc. as spam. This indicates they do not wish to receive any additional messages from the brand, regardless of type. No future messages will be sent to the email address.

• commercial_spam_complaint — A recipient reported a message designated as Commercial EmailA promotional email sent to an audience of users who have opted to receive promotional marketing messages from you. as spam. They have indicated that they do not want to receive future communications of that type. Transactional email will continue to be sent, but no future commercial email will be sent.

• imported — This value may be set manually via API or list upload to suppress a channel. No future messages will be sent to the email address.

Looking up suppression state

• API — Use the API to download a list of all email channels with their suppression state included.

  • Channel Lookup
  • Look Up an Email Address

• Dashboard — If you know the email address, named user, or channel ID that you are looking for, you can view the suppression state for an individual channel in Contact Management.

Setting suppression

Set suppression status for an individual email channel using the Suppress an Email Channel API.

Removing suppression

With the API, use the Remove Suppression from an Email Channel API to remove the suppression reason.

In the dashboard, you can remove suppression in Contact Management. Go to Audience » Contact Management, search for an email channel, and click   to see details.

If an email channel is suppressed, you will see a button for removing suppression. Click   next to the Opt-in Status check box to view the complaint reason. Click Remove suppression to remove the suppression state for the channel. After removing suppression, you must opt the channel back in to messaging before they can receive email from you again.

Bounce class reference

The bounce compliance event type reflects the reason that an email server or recipient rejected your email as a bounce_class. The bounce_class is a reason code between 1 and 100.