Hi guys,
So I have a question, I have a couple of emails were marked undeliverable but when I looked at the history of sends it shows that they opened the email…
I have a couple of questions: 1) why does this happen? 2) what should I do about those two email, delete it or keep it?
Hi Patrick,
Welcome in! Are you seeing they opened the email that was showing as undeliverable to them? If you see them as undeliverable but they are still subscribed, this means there was a temporary issue with the subscriber receiving emails (ex: their inbox could have been full when the message was sent).
We will automatically unsubscribe someone who is undeliverable if there is a permanent issue with their email address. You can also reach out to us and we can take a look at the specific addresses for you.
I see similar a thing occasionally - e.g. got one at the moment that shows 3 undeliverable messages in a row (last 3 days) but each of those also shows an open (one within 6 mins).
Did I read there was a plan to bring back the expanded info we used to have on undeliverables? That was really useful to know how to action them (temporary failures vs closed mailboxes vs incorrect addresses etc).
Hi Martin,
DM the email address in question, I can take a look. There’s a huge amount of variables that can impact those and they are often non intuitive to most users. Mailbox providers regularly precache or check images with security scanners which download images from messages thus causing images used for open detection to be loaded before a message is fully delivered. It’s also common for users to forward emails from one mailbox provider that caches images on to another email address that then bounces, thus showing an open for a recipient that then bounces as undeliverable.
In a perfect world, an opening user would never show up as undeliverable. The world is very imperfect and at scale, you’ll see all kinds of weird stuff.
It’s been over 20 years since we displayed full raw undeliverable text to end users. The vast majority of users have no idea how to interpret them and they cause a huge amount of angst and misunderstanding because the text that mailbox providers return is often contradictory and misleading. Even trained email experts regularly misunderstand what various errors mean from different mailbox providers. A big part of our services is offloading this back of the house maintenance from users so we take care of complicated stuff like this so you can trust that we’ve got it handled and you don’t have to worry about it.
Thanks Tom - I don’t think I can DM you on here, but just sent details to the support email.
Hi Martin,
Thanks for sending the information over, I just had a chance to take a look and while I replied privately I wanted to give some public context for others that might stumble on this thread in the future.
The user in question is forwarding mail from their New Zealand mailbox over to a Microsoft owned mailbox, likely outlook.com or another corporate hosted domain with Microsoft. The Microsoft mailbox is the one that’s bouncing and showing the undeliverable messages. Looking at the open and click data further, it looks like they are engaging with messages in their New Zealand mailbox as well as doing the forwarding to Microsoft, hence the data you’re seeing.
It’s notable, our bounce processing doesn’t immediately mark an address as undeliverable. It takes a number of failures over a longer period of time before they are removed. Details: https://help.aweber.com/hc/en-us/articles/204028566-What-does-AWeber-do-with-undeliverable-subscribers
As with any data set, look at enough samples and you’re bound to find odd outliers that are different than the behavior you see in 99.9% of the rest.
You could send them a personal message and just point out that their forwarding is currently broken and they should look to potentially fix it. In the grand scheme of things, unless these are paying customers, I’d just let the AWeber auto manage the undeliverables and move on.