Understanding delivery failures understanding-delivery-failures
About delivery failures about-delivery-failures
When a delivery cannot be sent to a profile, the remote server automatically sends an error message, which is picked up by the Adobe Campaign platform and qualified to determine whether or not the email address or phone number should be quarantined. See Bounce mail qualification.
Messages can also be excluded during the delivery preparation if an address is quarantined or if a profile is on the denylist. Excluded messages are listed in the Exclusion logs tab of the delivery dashboard (see this section).
Related topics:
Identifying delivery failures for a message identifying-delivery-failures-for-a-message
Once a delivery is sent, the Sending logs tab (see this section) allows you to view the delivery status for each profile and the associated failure type and reason (see Delivery failure types and reasons).
A dedicated out-of-the-box report is also available. This report details the overall hard and soft errors encountered during deliveries as well as the automatic processing of bounces. For more on this, refer to this section.
Delivery failure types and reasons delivery-failure-types-and-reasons
There are three types of errors when a delivery fails:
- Hard: A “hard” error indicates an invalid address. This involves an error message that explicitly states that the address is invalid, such as: “Unknown user”.
- Soft: This might be a temporary error, or one that could not be categorized, such as: “Invalid domain” or “Mailbox full”.
- Ignored: This is an error that is known to be temporary, such as “Out of office”, or a technical error, for example if the sender type is “postmaster”.
The possible reasons for a delivery failure are:
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Retries after a delivery temporary failure retries-after-a-delivery-temporary-failure
If a message fails due to a temporary error, retries will be performed during the delivery duration. For more on the types of errors, see Delivery failure types and reasons.
The number of retries (how many retries should be performed the day after the send is started) and the minimum delay between retries are now based on how well an IP is performing both historically and currently at a given domain. The Retries settings in Campaign are ignored.
To modify the duration of a delivery, go to the advanced parameters of the delivery or delivery template, and edit the Delivery duration field of the Validity period section.
For example, if you want retries for a delivery to stop after one day, you can set the delivery duration to 1d, and the messages in the retry queue will be removed after one day.
Synchronous and asynchronous errors synchronous-and-asynchronous-errors
A delivery can fail immediately (synchronous error), or later on, after it has been sent (asynchronous error).
- Synchronous error: the remote server contacted by the Adobe Campaign delivery server immediately returned an error message, the delivery is not allowed to be sent to the profile’s server.
- Asynchronous error: a bounce mail or a SR was resent later by the receiving server. Asynchronous errors can occur up until one week after a delivery has been sent.
Bounce mail qualification bounce-mail-qualification
For synchronous delivery failure error messages, the Adobe Campaign Enhanced MTA (Message Transfer Agent) determines the bounce type and qualification, and sends back that information to Campaign.
Asynchronous bounces are still qualified by the inMail process through the Inbound email rules. To access these rules, click the Adobe logo, at the top-left, then select Administration > Channels > Email > Email processing rules and select Bounce mails. For more on this rule, see this section.
For more on bounces and the different kinds of bounces, see this section.
Optimizing email deliverability with double opt-in mechanism optimizing-mail-deliverability-with-double-opt-in-mechanism
Double opt-in mechanism is a best practice when sending emails. It protects the platform from wrong or invalid email addresses, spambots, and prevents possible spam complaints.
The principle is to send an email to confirm the visitor’s agreement before storing them as ‘profiles’ into your Campaign database: the visitor fills out an online landing page, then receives an email and has to click in the confirmation link to finalize its subscription.
For more on this, see this section.