You’re doing e-mail blasts and receive back all these message delivery failure messages and you don’t know how to deal with them?
Personally I would not recommend immediately removing the corresponding contacts from your mailing list. It could happen that the delivery error be temporary and that the email address be good even though your message was rejected that day. Furthermore, don’t fully trust the explanation contained in the delivery failure message from the mail server: I have seen cases where a perfectly valid address was identified as unknown by the recipient’s mail server.
My recommendation is therefore to keep track of the delivery failures in your Act! database. If you’re doing regular email blasts and keep track of all the failures independently, you’ll be able to identify the contacts whose email have failed repeatedly.
How to keep track of failed deliveries in your Act! database
Every time you do an email blast, add a Yes/No field to your database that you call Rejected XX/XX/XX for instance. After each blast, store your delivery failure messages in a single location, then when they are all in, open each message and copy each rejected email address to a text file. Keep each email one below another in the file.
Then use our free Act! add-on called Email Addresses Lookup to create a lookup of the corresponding contacts (Email Addresses Lookup for Act! can quickly import addresses from a text file, hence the first step to copy all emails to a text file).
Once your lookup is created, simply check the Rejected Yes/No field corresponding to the blast for all the contacts at once: this can be achieved through the Edit>Replace menu.
After a few email campaigns, you’ll be able to identify the contacts whose email address has repeatedly failed and you’ll be in a position to safely purge your mailing list.
Email Addresses Lookup for Act! may be found with other free addons on Exponenciel Free Act! Add-ons page.