Campaign Tutorial: Suppressing Bad E-mail Addresses

Client Objective

Client ABC's e-mail list contains numerous bad e-mail addresses. It wants an e-mail address to be suppressed automatically if it hard bounces 3 times over the course of 20 days.

Here's the critical point on removing bad e-mail addresses: the main objective should NOT be to automatically suppress or delete bad e-mail addresses. The more important objective is to identify problem e-mail addresses and salvage those that are recoverable (e.g. john.doe@aol.con rather than john.doe@aol.com). If you have fax numbers, consider sending faxes to recipients encouraging them to submit updated e-mail addresses.

Once all avenues are exhausted, the remaining e-mail addresses can be flagged as "do not send" in your management database and/or suppressed in MagnetMail.

Step. 1: Create the Campaign

To begin, click MagnetMail’s “Campaign” tab and under the option “Create New Campaign”, input a campaign name (e.g. “Suppress Bad Emails”) and click the adjacent red button.

Step 2: Create an Action – Suppression

Next, you create the campaign’s actions. For this campaign, there is only one action: to suppress e-mail addresses that bounce three times over the course of 20 days.

Name the action “Suppress Bad Emails” and click the Next button.

Create new Action

From the Select Action Type page, select the “Suppress” radio button and click the Next button.

On the Select Search Method page, choose “By Advanced Search” and click the Next button.

In the row labeled “Bounced”, select the option Recurring Hard Bounces and click the Search button.

Next, set the parameters for the search by inputting the values in the Number of Hard Bounces field and the in the Last [ ] Days field (e.g. 3 and 20, respectively) and click the Next button.

On the Schedule an Action page

Select the action’s Start Date and End Date.
Next, select the time of day the action should run using the Schedule Action Time options - for example, 2:00 am.
Next, from the Interval pull down menu, select the frequency with which the action will run. For purposes of this campaign, input 21 days in the Every [ ] days option and click the Finish button.

A message confirming that the action has been created will be displayed. Now, every 21 days at 2:00 am, MagnetMail will search for all recipients whose e-mail addresses have hard bounced three times over the past 20 days and suppress them.

Again, by using the Campaign Tool to automatically suppressing bad e-mail addresses, the critical phase of inspecting for salvageable addresses (e.g. john.doe@aol.conrather than john.doe@aol.com) is removed from the process. Clients should consider this factor.