What does it even mean?
When you’re seeing the ‘bounced’ tag on a patient profile, or the messages in the Message Log are followed by a ‘Bad_Recipient’ tag, this indicates that the email has been sent, but was returned as undeliverable (Return to Sender– email style).
This means that the email provider (eg. ‘@gmail.com’ ‘@hotmail.com’ etc) was unable to deliver the email to their client (your patient).
Interesting, go on..
The reasons vary but the main categories are a soft bounce and a hard bounce, or a spam complaint.
1️⃣A soft bounce is something more temporary, such as the inbox is full and some space needs to be cleared out.
2️⃣A hard bounce is something more permanent– like a block, if the email address doesn’t exist–or if the patient email server is having an outage.
3️⃣And then a spam complaint just means that the patient reported a previous email as spam (this sometimes happens unintentionally).
Here’s a great document from Mailchimp that dives deeper into Bounces if you’d like to learn more.
Okay, but what do I do about it?
👉We always recommend double-checking the the email address is spelled correctly, or sometimes removing it entirely and re-typing it fresh (some typos are harder to spot!)
👉If that doesn’t seem to be the issue– the solution will depend on the reason for the bounce, and we’re able to take a deeper look to locate those reasons.
Feel free to pass along the example by sending us a direct URL link to the patient profile, and we can take a look to see if the patient’s email provider accompanied the rejection with a reason.
🙅🏽♀️For patient privacy, please do not submit full names or email addresses to us via email– just the direct link to the patient profile will do the trick. If you’re not sure how to do this, here’s a video to explain. Though unlike my example at the end, please let us know why you’re sending us this link– rather than just sending the link without explanation!
Once we know the reason for the bounce, we can let you know what the resolution steps are :)