Auto-cleansing Rules
Auto-cleansing is the automated process of suppressing email addresses of Users that have either complained or where repeated delivery failures have been encountered when sending emails.
This automated process is powered by a set of rules. There's one rule for each classification of hard & soft bounce plus there are additional rules to handle returned mail and complaints.
List Hygiene Basics
Email providers (e.g. Yahoo, AOL or Gmail) keep records of who sends them email and whether that email was accepted or bounced back to the sender.
The ratio of bounced to delivered emails plays a big role in determining a sender's reputation.
If the number of bounces generated by a particular sender is consistently high it has a negative effect on their reputation, greatly increasing the chances of email landing in a recipient's spam folder or even being permanently blocked.
In addition, if an email provider sees that a sender is continually triggering bounces for a particular email address, this indicates that the sender does not have a satisfactory data hygiene policy and has a serious negative impact on sender reputation.
Auto-cleansing is a vital part of making sure List data stays 'fresh' and helps keep your sender reputation in check.
How Auto-cleansing Rules are Applied
When sending email, the application monitors responses received from recipient mail servers. When the response received indicates that either a Hard or Soft Bounce has occurred, the Auto-cleanser checks to see how many bounces the User has triggered previously.
Once the number of consecutive* bounces for a particular email address exceeds the Auto-cleansing threshold the system will globally opt out the User.
*A successfully delivered email will reset the User's bounce count.
The threshold for Auto-cleansing varies according to the types of bounces received - "Bad Mailbox" will result in the email address being added to Global Suppression on it's first occurrence, while "Protocol Errors" needs to occur 5 times before that happens.
Using the recommended settings as an example: if a recipient were to trigger 3 "Protocol Error" bounces and then a "Relaying Issue" bounce, it would require another 2 "Protocol Error" bounces before the User was Auto-cleansed.
Setting Auto-cleansing Rules
The recommended settings suit 99.9% of requirements but there is the ability to custom each Auto-cleansing rule. Be sure you fully understand the implications of altering rule settings before making changes.
- Expand the "Campaigns" section in the sidebar.
- Click "Auto-cleansing Rules".
- Amend the response rules.
- Click "Save Changes".