I apologize in advance for placing an “email list” question on the RW forum but there are some sharp people here and I hope I can find some help from someone who might be experienced with email lists.
At at my wits end. We’ve run an opt-in mail list for years. I use aWeber to send to about 6500 subscribers. (currently testing Sendy with Amazon SES)
On Dec 5 of last month we had the system un-subscribe 1100 Yahoo accounts due to “undeliverable” mail. These were hard bounces and Yahoo essentially instructed the aWeber system to un-subscribe them since they were “non-deliverable.”
Around Christmas time I manually re-subscribed all 1100 and with the next mailing only about 150 came back as non-deliverable! So most are working successfully now.
Since then I’ve seen a significant rise in Hard Bounces. I’m seeing subscribers being un-subscribed by our system because SINGLE emails are being returned as non-deliverable. We used to average around 20 SOFT bounces a day… we are now seeing 20 to 200 HARD bounces which cause the subscriber to be un-subscribed.
Sadly, with aWeber I cannot actually see the error codes on returned mail. It’s a feature they don’t provide. They are telling me that all the error codes are valid “address does not exist” codes (554 error). When I asked why all these emails were seemingly delivered when I re-subscribed them they had no answer.
Yes, a good number of emails do fail when I retry. But I think it safe to say that most will then continue to work.
In summary… I used to see a small number of Soft bounces to each mailing… I’m now seeing large numbers of Hard bounces which does an immediate un-subscribe on the account.
I have no idea what is happening. Our content hasn’t changed. Everything we are doing is the same.
I’m currently testing Sendy/SES (duplicate emails to 130 subscribers) but since the emails are seemingly being rejected by the recipients server I doubt I would see any change by switching the entire list immediately to Sendy/SES.
I’m not sure I’m getting the truth here. If emails are rejected due to “invalid address” then why does followup re-subscribes work?
Comments? Ideas? Suggestion for help forum? There’s not a lot I can know FOR SURE without actually being able to see the error codes on the returned mail.