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Email subscription types in Freshmarketer

Any contact in Freshmarketer falls under one of the following email subscription types:

• Subscribed: The contact has authorized Freshmarketer to send them emails and has subscribed to at least 1 subscription type.
  
  
• Not Subscribed: The contact has yet to be added to any of the Freshmarketer subscription types.
  
  
• Unsubscribed: The contact was previously subscribed to emails and has since unsubscribed.
  
  
• Reported as Spam: The contact reported the emails sent to them as spam.
  
  
• Bounced: The email sent to the contact was rejected or bounced.

What are bounced email addresses?

An email bounce or a non-delivery report (NDR) is a report that is automatically generated by a mail server to inform the sender that their email was not successfully delivered. Emails that are not successfully delivered to the recipients are collectively referred to as Bounced emails.

There are two types of bounces–

• Hard bounce: Hard bounces usually occur when your subscriber email addresses are invalid, or if their mail servers have blocked your IP, or when their domain doesn’t exist.
  
  

• Soft bounce: Soft bounces occur when there is an issue with your subscribers’ mailboxes or mail servers.

Your bounce rate i.e proportion of the number of emails bounce vs the number of emails sent reflects the quality of your subscriber list. High bounce rates can impact the reputation of your email client and therefore affect deliverability. They can also trigger spam filters and block your emails from being delivered to customers. Hence, keeping bounced emails out of your list is vital. 

How does Freshmarketer handle these different email subscription types?

Freshmarketer handles each of these subscription types suitably in order to maintain the reputation and deliverability of your emails. Here’s how:

• For emails that get a soft bounce, Freshmarketer continues sending the emails.
  
  
• Whenever an email falls under one of these categories– Not subscribed, Unsubscribed, Reported as Spam, or Bounced– Freshmarketer stops outbound emails to these addresses and automatically blocks them as recipients on future emails. This prevents future bounces and protects your email reputation. 

What are dropped emails?

Dropped emails are those that have been stopped or prevented from being sent by Freshmarketer. SendGrid, the email client through which Freshmarketer’s emails are sent maintains a suppression list to which emails cannot be sent. The suppression list consists of three types of email addresses:

• Recipients who’ve marked DND

• Email addresses that are Bounced, blocked, or invalid addresses

• Spam email addresses
  
  

Whenever a campaign is run, Freshmarketer matches the recipient's email addresses with the suppression list and drops the emails that are a part of the list.