Email deliverability: best practices to avoid email bounces
Intended Audience: Administrators
Summary
If your portal's automated email messages cause too many hard bounces, Safety Made Simple disables your outbound mail, until you can resolve the problem email addresses.
About Safety Made Simple email
Safety Made Simple delivers several automated emails to users on your behalf, like:
- portal invitations
- enrollment notifications
- password resets
Portal email disabled
Safety Made Simple is a Software as a Service
(SaaS) product based on infrastructure powered by Amazon Web
Services (AWS). To deliver automated email successfully and reliably, Safety
Made Simple uses Amazon's Simple Exchange Service (SES).
Amazon SES use a bounce rate, combined with other metrics,
to determine the credibility of an email and email sender. If too many bounces
originate from one sender (for Amazon, Safety Made Simple counts as one
sender), Safety Made Simple can appear as a spam sender. This risk could
affect all Safety Made Simple customers.
To protect all Safety Made Simple customers, Safety Made
Simple follows a strict policy regarding bounces originating from one portal.
If a significant number of bounces come from a single portal, Safety Made
Simple automatically disables outbound email from that portal, to protect all
of our customers.
If your portal email is disabled, your top level portal
administrators receive:
- An automated banner notification at the top of
the portal where email is disabled
- An email from the Safety Made Simple Support
team, notifying you about your disabled portal email, with advice for next
steps
When
possible, Safety Made Simple sends you a notification when your portal is
approaching the threshold, before exceeding the limit. However, Safety Made
Simple can't always send these notifications.
For example: most automated emails go out in large batches,
like in group course enrollments, or batch uploads. A large batch of emails,
with bounces, could reach the warning level, and then exceed the bounce limit
in a single delivery. Safety Made Simple would not have time to warn you about
it.
Understanding bounces for a portal
For the types of emails Safety Made Simple sends from portals (intentional enrollment emails, for example, rather than marketing email) the most significant contributor to our credibility rating is bounce percentage.
There are two broad types of bounces:
Soft bounces are temporary deliverability problems. Reasons may include:
- Recipient's mailbox is full
- The email message is too large
- The recipient email server rejected the content of the email
- The recipient email server sent a general bounce message, such as an out of office reply
Hard bounces indicate that the recipient server cannot deliver email to this address or domain permanently. Reasons may include:
- The recipient email server sends a bounce message indicating this address does not exist or the email is not yet valid in the recipient’s email server
- The recipient's email address is on the Amazon SES suppression list, because it has a recent history of producing hard bounces
- The recipient email server sends a hard bounce, but did not indicate a reason
Amazon only counts hard bounces into their
reliability rating, meaning only hard bounces contribute to your portal's
bounce rate.
Hard bounces often come from:
- using fake (made-up) email addresses during setup and testing for your portal
- having "stale" accounts with old email addresses, for users who are no longer using your portal
- batch uploads of unverified email addresses
Note: if you re-enter an email
address for a user, ensure it is a valid/working email address or you
will run the risk of the email address being permanently disabled.Understanding individual email bounces
Safety Made Simple disables a user's account after a single hard bounce. This automated response prevents a pileup of additional hard bounces.
If a user reports they are not receiving messages, check to see if their login is disabled, which would pause notifications. You can enable their account again as needed.
If their account is enabled, contact the Safety Made Simple Support Team to ask if the user's email address generated a hard bounce.
Support
needs to confirm the email is valid and capable of receiving messages, before
enabling email delivery again.
For
customers with a custom sending domain: subscribe to Amazon bounce
notifications. Amazon sends a notification every time a bounce originates from
your portal.
Restoring deliverability
If Safety Made Simple disables your portal's email, you need to address the following questions with Safety Made Simple Support, before the support team can restore your email service:
- What led to this significant number of bounces from your portal? Safety Made Simple Support can provide you with a list of the most recent email bounces to help your investigation, at your request.
- What will you do with the existing data within your portal to make sure hard bounces don't happen, right after re-enabling your portal email?
- What steps will you put in place to prevent hard bounces from happening again in future?
Once you identify your next steps, Safety Made Simple can start to restore your email deliverability.
Best practices
To ensure your automated email service, you need to aim for 0 bounces originating from your portal. Some suggestions to avoid causing bounces:
- When testing, use legitimate email addresses that can receive emails rather than fake email addresses
- When adding large groups of users from the same domain, confirm with the domain's IT team that the domain can receive email from external sources. Some industry IT policies are strict and need to add Safety Made Simple to their safe senders list (trustlist, sometimes called whitelist) before accepting email
- Add a process for disabling or deleting users in Safety Made Simple when they no longer need access to your portal, for whatever reasons. When you disable a learner in your portal, Safety Made Simple no longer sends email to that account
- Validate lists of emails coming from external sources, using a 3rd party service
- For customers with a custom sending domain: subscribe to Amazon
bounce notifications. Amazon sends a notification every time a bounce
originates from your portal.
Note: If you currently use a custom sending domain and do not receive bounce
notifications, contact the Support team, who can resend you a subscription link.Related Articles
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