Email Delivery FAQ

Hard Bounces : The system automatically detects hard bounces and flags the email address as bounced. This is done to prevent any future delivery to this email address. The flagging is done immediately as the mail servers receive the bounced message.

Soft Bounces : The system currently does not differentiate between a hard bounce and a soft bounce. Any bounce message is considered a hard bounce. However, in the near future we are planning on implementing a system to flag soft bounces separately so that they can be tracked and monitored. The current plan is to have a system where 5 or more soft bounces equate to a hard bounce.

Instantaneously. The database is updated as and when the bounce notifications and messages are received by our mail servers.

Every email that the end user gets using our system, has an unsubscribe link at the end of the email. If a user clicks on the unsubscribe link, the system immediately marks the email address as unsubscribed and will prevent all future emails to that email address.

There are no delays / processing time involved for unsubscribe requests since this is done automatically and over the web.

The system provides and easy mechanism to search for email addresses within a list and mark them as unsubscribed. Our Anti-Spam policy requires that our customers honor manual unsubscribe requests within 24 hours.

Yes. Every email that goes out using the system, has a link for the end user to report the email as SPAM. If the user reports an email as SPAM, they are automatically removed from the mailing list. Further more, if we receive excessive SPAM complaints for a customers, we will terminate our service agreement with them.

It is flagged and recorded as such in the database. This is done to ensure that the user is not sent another email address.

Currently the following set of IP addresses are used to send out email:

Note: Customers do NOT have a dedicated IP address. This is a shared (ESP) environment.

Both SenderID and DomainKeys are slated to go live September 1st 2007. More information about Sender ID and DomainKeys can be found in the references section below.

Different email systems implement Out-Of-Office Autoreplies differently. As such there are not RFC's or standards regarding the rules on how OUt-Of-Office Autoreply systems should handle. In general, however if the the systems reply back to SurveyAnalytics we will consider that to be a "Hard Bounce" and mark the email as bounced. If however them out-of-office autoreply goes to the email sender (Email From Address) the email is NOT marked as bounced. So, depending upon the receiving system, the email may be categorized as bounced or not.