Contact status

All contacts in Mailee.me have a status. This status gives us information about the contact’s actions. It also informs us if the contact can or cannot receive messages. This article shows the life cycle of contacts in Mailee. We’ll see:

1. What are the different statuses of contacts
2. What are the actions that change those statuses
3. Which statuses are enabled to receive messages
4. How to view your contact’s status

Contact status

When you access your contact list’s page, you can see a graphical representation of the different statuses. You can see them on the Contacts tab.

Verifying and SMTPCheck

Every contact you registered on Mailee.me will start as Verifying. These contacts will pass through Mailee.me’s filter. If approved, the contact will be marked as Unknown. Otherwise, it will be marked as Hard Bounce. The status SMTPCheck means that the filter is currently analyzing the contact’s domain, verifying whether it’s a valid domain and can receive messages.

This filter should be quick, taking just some minutes. But, since there is some time for them to finish, you cand send messages to contacts with this status.

After this analysis, the contact can be either:

Unknown

In this case, the contact was approved by the filter, but we don’t have any information to ensure the validity of the email address, or the existence of the contact. To have this information, we need to first send a message to the contacts.

Contacts with this status can receive messages.

Hard bounce

This status means that the contact was considered invalid by Mailee.me’s filter. This can be caused due to several reasons:

1. The email provider doesn’t exist or isn’t correctly set to receive emails.
2. A message was sent, but the email provider informed the contact does not exist.
3. Three consecutive messages were sent, but the email provider informed there was some problem (see Soft Bounce).

Contacts with this status cannot receive messages.

After sending for the first time, contacts can be classified as:

Valid

Last message was successfully sent to the contact, but the contact didn’t interact with it. There wasn’t any bounce from the server either. This means there isn’t any problem with the email address but the contact is either ignoring the messages or opening them without enabling images, which is rather common.

Contacts with this status can receive messages.

Confirmed

This status means either that the contact has already interacted with a message of yours and there was no bounce or unsubscribing or that they subscribed thourgh an online form and validated their email.

Contacts with this status can receive messages.

Waiting

This status means that the contact subscribed via an online form, but hasn’t validated their email. To validate it, this contact will receive an email with the validation link and should click it. Once validated, the contact will then have the status as Confirmed.

Contacts with this status cannot receive messages.

Check out this article for some good practices to warn your contacts that they should click the opt-in message.

Invited

A contact with the status Invited has received an email message through a Forward to a friend link. Thus, you can see it in your contact list, but, in order to be subscribed to your campaigns, the contact should click the “Subscribe” button indluded in your message.

Unsubscribed

This status means the contact asked to be unsubscribed. The reason for the unsubscribe is shown on the list of unsubscribed contacts and also on the unsubscribe report of each message sent.

At the moment of unsubscribing, it is possible to report as SPAM as well. If this was the case, it is counted in our client’s monitoring base.

Contacts with this status cannot receive messages.

Soft bounce

This status means that the last message sent to the contact returned with some temporary error. You’re still able to send messages to this contact. If there are three consecutive returns, the contact will be marked as Hard Bounce.

Most common mistakes are:

1. Problem after leaving our server. The email is probably a hard bounce. It will receive a future message.
2. Temporary problem on the network.
3. Your email was rejected by the email server. Try following the best email marketing practices on the next sending.
4. Client’s inbox is full.
5. Client server is unavailable.
6. Uncataloged error.

Blocked

Contacts with this status were blocked by Mailee.me because they were used in messages with a high number of SPAM complaints and/or bounces. All the email lists used in those campaigns are blocked, and cannot be used in future sendings. To unblock them, you should get in touch with Mailee’s team to disclose the origin of those contacts, what is your relation to them, and how they gave permission to receive your messages.

Flow

Here, you can see a simplified flow of the possible changes to a status: