Before starting email marketing or resuming after a hiatus, therapists must clean their email contact lists. Failure to do so will result in reduced deliverability for email marketing, even for valid emails.
Healthy, clean email marketing means that all emails sent from your practice are more likely to get through. A low “sender score” means that mail servers will consider you a possible spammer. This will reduce delivery rates for emails that you send out from your therapists, reminder emails from your front desk, and billing emails from your finance team.
Get professional help from Therapy Everywhere to maintain the health of your contact list.
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How we classify problematic emails
When we “rinse and clean” your contact list, we verify the validity and deliverability of email addresses. A “Valid” status for an email is great! Here is a quick overview of other statuses that we might apply to emails in your list.
Emails with “Abuse” status
An email address marked “abuse” has often marked previous emails as spam. In some cases, the address is a known spam trap used to identify senders with poor list hygiene.
Recommended Action: Remove this address to protect your sender reputation and avoid being blacklisted by Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
Email address with “Catch-all” status
“Catch-all” status for an email means that the email server is configured to accept all emails sent to that domain, even if the specific email address doesn’t exist.
In this case, we cannot determine whether the email address is valid because the server always returns a “success” message. This status carries a high risk of bounces.
Recommended Action: We generally recommend NOT including these emails in your campaigns. If you do use them, monitor their bounce rate closely. We recommend checking for domains that may seem unrelated or suspicious.
Do not mail status
We apply “Do_not_mail” status to email addresses that we recommend not using, even though they are technically valid. This might be because the email address is classified as:
- A spam trap
- An address known to report spam (similar to “abuse” status)
- Belonging to people confirmed to be deceased.
- Known as related to legal threats or lawsuits.
Recommended action: Remove from your contact list to avoid consequences to your sender reputation.
Emails classsifed as “Invalid”
We classify an email as “invalid” when we have determined with a high degree of certainty that the email address does not exist or cannot be delivered. Invalid covers different types of “hard bounces”, including:
- Mailbox not found
- Invalid syntax (missing ‘@’ or a dot)
- Mail server does not exist (the domain may have gone offline)
- The mailbox is full (especially if this message repeats over time)
Recommended action: Remove from your contact list to avoid hard bounces, which can damage your sender score.
Emails marked as “Unknown” status
This status is applied when we cannot complete the validation process, typically because of a temporary server issue or because the mail server returned an ambiguous result.
Recommended action: Do not send yet. At a later date, resubmit for validation. If the issue is transient and they are later marked as valid, keep them in your list. If the problem recurs, we recommend removing them to minimize bounce risk.