If you have recently seen an increase in email subscribers, your eyes are not fooling you. It is related to a revision of the rules of how Feathr manages email subscriptions. Read on for more details.
Updated Subscription Rules
Our team discovered that a number of email addresses were being unsubscribed after the address was emailed and "soft bounced" 5 times within a short time span, and when inboxes were full.
Because these are temporary conditions that do not reflect a desire on that address's part to permanently unsubscribe, we updated the rules of our subscription management to exclude this soft bounce.
Many times, the bounces were simply due to an actively subscribed email address being contacted during a period of time off, when their auto-response was activated.
Soft vs. Hard Bounce
A bounce is when an email is returned as undeliverable. The bounce can be "soft" or "hard." Soft bounces are usually due to a temporary condition, such as a full inbox or a server being down. Hard bounces are more permanent, such as a deactivated email account, or a permanent error returning.
It is important to remove hard bouncing addresses from your email subscriptions because a high number of hard bounces can impact your organization's email health.
Soft bounces, however, usually do not impact your domain's email sending health. Soft bounces tend to resolve when the recipient (or the server) solves the error that is causing the bounce.
Most reasons that cause soft bounces do not indicate that the recipient should be unsubscribed, hence the update in our subscription rules.