When an email can't be delivered
Sometimes a reply to a customer bounces. When that happens, the email provider marks the recipient's address as suppressed and stops delivering future messages to it. An address gets suppressed for one of three reasons:
Hard bounce - the address does not exist, or the receiving server permanently rejected the message.
Spam complaint - the recipient marked one of your emails as spam.
Manual suppression - the address was suppressed on purpose.
What Productlane does automatically
When a reply fails because the recipient is suppressed, Productlane:
Flags the contact with a warning, so you can see at a glance that delivery to this address is blocked.
Reopens the thread if it had been marked done, and marks it unread, so the conversation comes back into your inbox instead of staying silently closed.
Adds an internal note to the thread explaining that delivery failed and which address was affected.
You will see a yellow Email delivery blocked warning on the contact in the thread sidebar. Hover it to read the reason and the re-subscribe action.
How to re-subscribe a contact
Click the Email delivery blocked warning on the contact. Productlane removes the suppression on the email provider and clears the flag. Once that succeeds, you will see an Email reactivated confirmation and you can reply again.
Note: re-subscribe a contact only when you are confident the address is valid and the recipient wants to hear from you. Reactivating an address that keeps bouncing can harm your domain's sending reputation.
Spam complaints stay blocked
If the address was suppressed because of a spam complaint, the email provider blocks self-service reactivation. The warning stays, and re-subscribing shows a message with the next steps:
Ask the recipient to confirm they want to receive your emails again.
Email [email protected] with the address and the recipient's confirmation. We ask our email provider to lift the suppression.
Replies to that contact keep bouncing until the suppression is lifted.