Constituent Email Status

The EMAIL_STATUS field on the Convio Consitutent record influences the deliverable state of the Constituent. The EMAIL_STATUS field may hold one of four distinct states.

• Unknown: The email address has recently been added to the Constituent360 database. This address has not been associated with any action on the site or response to email that might validate it.
  
• Good: The email address has been associated with an action on the site or has responded to an email that has targeted it such as opening or clicking through.
  
• Bad (Soft Bounce): The recipient domain has responded with a 4xx error (temporary) when attempts have been made to deliver to this address.
  
• Bad (Hard Bounce): The recipient domain has responded with a 5xx error (permanent) when attempts have been made to deliver to this address.

In each case where the EMAIL_STATUS has reached a state of Bad it is an indication that messages targeted at the record have not arrived as intended. Though both Hard and Soft Bounces are distinguished as bad there are distinct differences in how these are handled by the Convio product. Please note that the treatment of Bounces differs between platforms (see: http://community.customer.convio.com/docs/DOC-1931).

Soft Bounce:

• The Soft Bounce status WILL NOT prevent a constituent from being targeted by an email campaign.
• The status of Soft Bounce is used in the determination of what pool IP from which to source the message.
• Soft Bounce count will be incremented as successive Soft Bounces are returned for an email address.
• No number of successive Soft Bounces will result in a constituent being marked as Hard Bounce.

Hard Bounce:

• The Hard Bounce status WILL prevent a constituent from being targeted by an email campaign.
• The status of Hard Bounce is achieved when 2 successive Hard Bounces are recorded with no intervening action atributable to a message received after the initial Hard Bounce.
• The Hard Bounce status and Hard Bounce count will automatically* be reset after an intervening action atributable to a message received after the initial Hard Bounce.
• The Hard Bounce status and Hard Bounce count will automatically be reset if the constituent email address is updated by a data import or action altering the constituent record.

* This is configurable at the site level and may be disabled though it is on by default. Disabling of open rate tracking and click through details does hamper the function of this feature. These too are on by default.