What is the process by which an email status of unknown gets changed to good or hard bounce, etc?

Esther Pomeleo-Fowler

A couple of things can make an email status show as unknown:

An Unknown email status is only assigned upon the creation of a new record. Once the Email Status field has been changed to Good or Bad, it can not return to Unknown. Contact records created via DataSync (Import/Export) start out with an email status of 'Unknown'. Also, if a person's registered from the administrative side, their email status starts out as 'unknown'.

Once a person with an unknown address performs an action, such as opening the email, etc.. their status would change to good (provided it's an HTML email). However, if they received a text version the status will not change.

If the email bounces it will be reflected in the status after the Constituent's accumulated bounce count is calculated.