Undeliverable
This post written by Sean Conta, Founder & CXO
I get a lot of questions regarding the process that we have in place on MyPunchbowl when a Save the Date or Invitation email bounces. A “bounce” means the email is undeliverable and is rejected by the receiving mail server. Most people have had this experience at least once in their personal email account.
This is one of those issues where, unfortunately, the underlying reasons for doing what we do is not clearly apparent to the user.
It all comes down to our ability to deliver email. Delivering emails successfully (to a guest’s inbox) is a very important part of what we do. No one likes it when their emails get caught in a spam or junk folder, but there are many many aspects (mostly technical) to how we avoid that. One of them is how we handle bounced emails.
You see, if we try to send an email to a non-existent address (for example, if you made a typo in the email) the email provider rejects it. Let’s use Hotmail as an example. If we keep trying to send emails to the same non-existent Hotmail address, they start to get suspicious. Why? Because this is something spammers do. They generate a list of emails programmatically and just send thousands and thousands at a time, not knowing if there is an actual existing inbox at the other end. So this is one way that Hotmail keeps on the lookout for spammers. If you keep trying to send mail to a non-existent address, you get on Hotmail’s bad side, so to speak.
Back to MyPunchbowl. To deal with this issue, we let an email bounce twice, and then we automatically “quarantine” it in our system. We don’t let anyone try to send to it again.
The host gets an email saying “There was a problem sending your email to _______”. We then automatically put the email back into your Add More Guests page so that you see it in your account and you can correct it. If you try to add that same bounced address to your guest list you see a message that says “Delivery to this address has previously failed” and you’re asked to contact support (me).
It might not be a perfect system, occasionally an email bounces when the address is correct, but most people agree that the most important thing is getting emails to their guest’s inbox.
