Understanding quarantine management understanding-quarantine-management
About quarantines about-quarantines
An email address or a phone number can be quarantined, for example, when the mailbox is full or if the address does not exist.
In any case, the quarantine procedure complies with specific rules described in this section.
Optimizing your delivery through quarantines optimizing-your-delivery-through-quarantines
The profiles whose email addresses or phone number are in quarantine are automatically excluded during message preparation (see Identifying quarantined addresses for a delivery). This will speed up deliveries, as the error rate has a significant effect on delivery speed.
Some internet access providers automatically consider emails to be spam if the rate of invalid addresses is too high. Quarantine therefore allows you to avoid being added to denylist by these providers.
Moreover, quarantines help reducing SMS sending costs by excluding erroneous phone numbers from deliveries.
For more on best practices to secure and optimize your deliveries, refer to this page.
Quarantine vs Denylist quarantine-vs-denylist
Quarantine and denylist do not apply to the same object:
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Quarantine applies only to an address (or phone number, etc.), not to the profile itself. For example, a profile whose email address is quarantined could update their profile and enter a new address, and could then be targeted by delivery actions again. Likewise, if two profiles happen to have the same phone number, they will both be affected if the number is quarantined.
The quarantined addresses or phone numbers are displayed in the exclusion logs (for a delivery) or in the quarantine list (for the entire platform).
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Being on the denylist, on the other hand, will result in the profile no longer being targeted by the delivery, such as after an unsubscription (opt-out), for a given channel. For example, if a profile on the denylist for the email channel has two email addresses, both addresses will be excluded from delivery. For more on the denylist process, refer to About opt-in and opt-out in Campaign.
You can check if a profile is on the denylist for one or more channels in the No longer contact (on denylist) section of the profile’s General tab. See this section.
Identifying quarantined addresses identifying-quarantined-addresses
Quarantined addresses can be displayed for a specific delivery or for the entire platform.
Identifying quarantined addresses for a delivery identifying-quarantined-addresses-for-a-delivery
Quarantined addresses for a specific delivery are listed during the delivery preparation phase, in the Exclusion logs tab of the delivery dashboard (see this section). For more on delivery preparation, refer to this section.
Identifying quarantined addresses for the entire platform identifying-quarantined-addresses-for-the-entire-platform
Administrators can access the detailed list of the email addresses in quarantine for the entire platform from the Administration > Channels > Quarantines > Addresses menu.
Filters are available to help you browse through the list. You can filter on the address, the status, and/or the channel.
You can edit or delete each entry, as well as create new ones.
To edit an entry, click the corresponding row and modify the fields as needed.
To manually add a new entry, use the Create button.
Define the address (or phone number, etc.) and channel type. You can set a status for being in the quarantine list and an error reason. You can also indicate the date when the error occurred, the number of errors, and enter the error text. If needed, select the last delivery that was sent to the address from the drop-down list.
Removing a address from quarantine removing-a-quarantined-address
Automatic updates unquarantine-auto
Addresses that match specific conditions are automatically deleted from the quarantine list by the Database cleanup workflow. Learn more about technical workflows, see this section.
The addresses are automatically removed from the quarantine list in the following cases:
- Addresses in a Erroneous status will be removed from the quarantine list after a successful delivery.
- Addresses in a Erroneous status will be removed from the quarantine list if the last soft bounce occurred more than 10 days ago. For more on soft error management, see this section.
- Addresses in a Erroneous status that bounced with the Mailbox full error will be removed from the quarantine list after 30 days.
Their status then changes to Valid.
The maximum number of retries to be performed in case of Erroneous status and the minimum delay between retries are now based on how well an IP is performing both historically and currently at a given domain.
Manual updates unquarantine-manual
You can also un-quarantine an address manually. To manually remove an address from the quarantine list, you can remove it from the quarantine list or change its status to Valid.
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Select the address from the Administration > Channels > Quarantines > Addresses list and select Delete element.
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Select an address and change its Status to Valid.
Bulk updates unquarantine-bulk
You might need to perform bulk updates on the quarantine list, for example in case of an ISP outage. In such case, emails are wrongly marked as bounces because they cannot be successfully delivered to their recipient. These addresses must be removed from the quarantine list.
To perform this, create a workflow and add a Query activity on your quarantine table to filter out all impacted recipients. Once identified, they can be removed from the quarantine list, and included in future Campaign email deliveries.
Based on the timeframe of the incident, below are the recommended guidelines for this query.
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Error text (quarantine text) contains “550-5.1.1” AND Error text (quarantine text) contains “support.ISP.com”
where “support.ISP.com” can be: “support.apple.com” or “support.google.com” for example
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Update status (@lastModified) on or after MM/DD/YYYY HHSS AM
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Update status (@lastModified) on or before MM/DD/YYYY HHSS PM
Once you have the list of affected recipients, add an Update data activity to set their email address status to Valid so they will be removed from the quarantine list by the Database cleanup workflow. You can also just delete them from the quarantine table.
Conditions for sending an address to quarantine conditions-for-sending-an-address-to-quarantine
Adobe Campaign manages quarantine according to the delivery failure type and the reason assigned during error messages qualification (see Delivery failure types and reasons and Bounce mail qualification).
- Ignored error: ignored errors do not send an address to quarantine.
- Hard error: the corresponding email address is immediately sent to quarantine.
- Soft error: soft errors do not send immediately an address to quarantine, but they increment an error counter. For more on this, see Soft error management.
If a user qualifies an email as a spam (feedback loop), the message is automatically redirected towards a technical mailbox managed by Adobe. The user’s email address is then automatically sent to quarantine with the On denylist status. This status refers to the address only, the profile is not on the denylist, so that the user continues receiving SMS messages and push notifications.
In the list of quarantined addresses (see Identifying quarantined addresses for the entire platform), the Error reason field indicates why the selected address was placed in quarantine.
Soft error management soft-error-management
As opposed to hard errors, soft errors do not send immediately an address to quarantine, but instead they increment an error counter.
Retries will be performed during the delivery duration. When the error counter reaches the limit threshold, the address goes into quarantine. For more on this, refer to Retries after a delivery temporary failure.
The error counter is reinitialized if the last significant error occurred more than 10 days ago. The address status then changes to Valid and it is deleted from the list of quarantines by the Database cleanup workflow. (For more on technical workflows, see this section.)