Broadcast Email: Bounce List

Last Update :

What this page is

The Bounce List shows email addresses belonging to your members that have recently failed to deliver – most often because an address is invalid or a receiving mail server rejected the message. You'll find it under Broadcast Messages → Bounce List in the members area admin menu.

Reviewing this list regularly is the single most important thing you can do to protect your email deliverability. When you repeatedly send to invalid addresses, receiving mail servers (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc.) interpret it as a sign of a low-quality sender and may start sending all of your messages – even to good addresses – to spam or blocking them outright.

How the list works

• It updates automatically, about once an hour. You don't add anything to it manually; the system records delivery failures as they come back from receiving servers.
• It covers a rolling 20-day window. The list reflects bounces from roughly the last 20 days and can include bounces generated by other parts of MMS, not just broadcast email.
• Entries clear themselves. If an address stops bouncing, it automatically drops off the list 20 days after its last bounce – no action needed. So if you see an address that is actually correct and has since started working, you can safely leave it alone.
• It matches bounces to your members. An address appears only when it matches a member's primary or secondary email. The Count column shows how many times that address has bounced (tracked separately for the primary and secondary email).

Reading the list

Summary cards (top of page). A row of cards totals the bounces and breaks them down by category. Click any card to filter the table to just that category; click Total Bounces to show everything again. The categories are:

• Bad Email – The address doesn't exist (no such user, invalid mailbox, account closed/inactive, etc.). These are the ones you should act on.
• Blacklist – Your sending server or domain was flagged by a spam/reputation blocklist.
• General Block / Content Block – The receiving server blocked the message, in some cases based on its content.
• DMARC – The message failed the sender's DMARC authentication policy.
• Mailbox Full – The recipient is over quota / out of storage.
• Timeout – The connection to the receiving server timed out.
• Other – Anything that doesn't match the categories above.

Table columns:

• Member – Name plus context (employer, phone, subgroup, member type, last-change info, and flags such as (dropped) or (suppress-all selected)).
• Email & Bounce Reason – The bouncing address and the raw reason text returned by the receiving server. If an address has bounced more than five times and its domain has no valid mail server, you'll see a red “(check spelling — mail server not found)” warning, which usually means the domain is mistyped. Click more to expand a member's recent bounce history.
• Last Bounce – The date of the most recent bounce.
• Count – Total number of bounces for that address.

Filters and export

• Filter by Member Type and Filter by Domain narrow the list; Clear filters resets it. Domain filtering is useful for spotting a provider-wide issue (e.g., a batch of bounces all from one domain).
• Download CSV exports the current list for offline review or cleanup.

Taking action on a record

Each row has an actions menu (the â‹® icon). Depending on your permissions and the record, you can:

• Update email address – Opens a quick dialog to correct the member's email (and secondary email, if your org uses one) without leaving the page. This is the fastest fix for a typo or a changed address.
• Edit member record – Opens the full member record.
• Delete member record / Drop member record – Available for non-member record types (and a few specific organizations) to remove or drop records whose addresses are no longer reachable.

If mass delete is enabled for your organization (and you have the required permission), checkboxes appear so you can select multiple eligible records and either Mass Delete Selected Records or Remove Emails from Selected Records in one step.

Using the list to prevent future bounces

Different bounce types call for different responses:

• Bad Email (invalid address) – Act on these first. Fix the address with Update email address if it's a typo (watch for the “mail server not found” warning), reach out to the member for a current address, or remove/drop the record if it's no longer valid. Leaving known-bad addresses in place and continuing to email them is what damages your sender reputation over time.
• Mailbox Full / Timeout – Usually temporary. No action is generally needed; these clear on their own once the recipient frees space or the server responds.
• Blacklist / General Block / DMARC / Content – These point to deliverability or reputation issues rather than a single bad address. Make sure you're sending from a valid Reply/From address whose domain is authorized for the MMS server (see below), and contact support if blocks persist or look like false positives.
• Other – Review the reason text; handle case by case.

General best practices:

1. Check the list on a regular schedule (e.g., after each broadcast campaign) and clean up the Bad Email entries promptly.
2. Keep addresses current – correcting and removing invalid addresses keeps your bounce rate low and your reputation healthy.
3. Don't panic over self-clearing entries – anything that's actually working again will age off in 20 days.
4. Report false positives to support rather than ignoring a recurring entry you believe is valid.

Email deliverability (advanced)

For organizations sending from their own “From” address, broadcast email is sent through the MMS server, and receiving servers check that the server is authorized to send for that domain via SPF and DKIM DNS records. A super-user Email Deliverability panel on this page lists the From addresses used in the last six months and whether each domain's SPF and DKIM are configured correctly. If a domain you control shows “no” for SPF or DKIM – a common root cause of Blacklist, Block, and DMARC bounces – contact support to get the DNS records set up.