Next up in the deluge of new features this month: Email Bounce Notifications. There’s been an ongoing issue in Rex that we’ve been working on for a while now. If an email failed to reach the recipient’s inbox (bounced), you’d have no idea. Your mail would be lost in cyberspace - much like the bad guys from Superman 2 who were banished to forever float through space, trapped in that weird two-dimensional thing. We don’t know how that works, but it sure looked pretty lonely.But anyway, emails are important - so we’re happy to say, after a tonne of behind-the-scenes coding, we have email bounce notifications. Rex now tells you if an email bounces so you can find other means of contact to get your message across.
What are email bounces?
An ‘email bounce’ is basically a clever way of saying your email hasn’t sent properly. Essentially, if there’s proverbial brick-wall between you and your recipient’s inbox, you’ll know about it.There are a number of reasons emails might bounce - to name a few:
- The recipient’s mailbox might be unavailable.
- The recipient’s mailbox might be full.
- Your message might be too large.
- There’s a problem with the recipient’s server.
- A filter has intentionally blocked your message because the recipient’s service provider thinks its spam.
- The email address you’re attempting to send your message to doesn’t exist.
How bounce notifications work in Rex
When you send a message with Rex, we’ll attempt to deliver it to the contact’s primary email address. If there’s an issue and they’re not accepting your mail, then an ‘email bounce’ message comes back to us explaining why it’s not safely tucked away in the intended inbox. We’ll let you know what went wrong. The faulty email address will also be added to Rex’s bounce list - our little black book of no-good, meddling, hard-to-reach contacts. We won’t attempt to send any more messages to that address again – unless you tell us otherwise. You can remove an email from the bounce list by marking the address as ‘valid’, or fixing the address if it’s been entered incorrectly. For more information, see Invalid Emails in the Contact Module. If your message bounces we’ll send you a notification via email. You might be receiving a whole lot of these notifications if you’re sending bulk emails, so you can turn them on or off whenever you like. (By default, these notifications are initially turned on for all users). For more information, see Email Bounce Notifications.
Dealing with invalid email addresses
It’s subsequently worth noting that we’ve added some great new functionality to help you clean up these pesky contacts. You can now filter your contacts for invalid email addresses – making it far easier to find (and remove) your faulty emails. For more information, see Filtering Contacts. On top of this, we’ve added an email validation tool that’ll pick up errors or inconsistencies in any new addresses you enter - prevention is better than a cure, after all. Starting today, if you enter an email address for a contact and Rex notices it’s invalid – the address will be underlined in bright, stoplight red. Fat-fingered errors (such as using a comma rather than a full-stop) will be detected; but keep in mind we’re only performing a simple validation to make sure your email address looks like an email address. Even so, if you do end up logging an incorrect address, we’ll pick it up and let you know it’s invalid as soon as you try to send a message. You’ll be able to fix it then. Our new safety nets will make sure very little will fall through the cracks again.
