A customer record in Deployteq has multiple properties that determine whether or not customer records can or cannot be emailed.

The following information pertains to Deployteq's email sending process and is completely separate from how customer selection for sending is done (profile, group, CSV trigger, custom), and how the sending is executed (Campaign or Quickmail). The email sending process looks at the following properties and decides whether the customer record will be emailed or not.

When is it allowed?

The following three properties are about whether or not a customer record can be emailed:

• Opt-in (email)

This is the general consent field. This field records whether the customer has given permission for receiving bulk mailings. A bulk mailing is a mailing where you send the same email content to multiple customers, regardless of whether it's 2 or 200,000 customers. If this field is set to "No," Deployteq will never send a bulk mailing to this customer record.

Important: Deployteq does not differentiate between the type of email content (service message, newsletter, etc.). Once an email content is sent to more than one customer, it is considered a bulk mailing, and the status of the Opt-in (email) field is taken into account.

• Status

Determines the overall status of the customer record itself. Is it a questionable case (suspect), a potential customer (prospect), an actual customer (customer), or someone who should not be emailed (blacklist)? If this field is set to "blacklist," no email content will be sent to this record via a bulk mailing.

• Complaint

It may happen that a customer receives an email and is not happy with it. The customer can then choose to mark the received email as spam in their email program. In that case, we receive a "Complaint" from certain email providers, indicating that they do not want similar email content to be sent to that email address in the future. We register this complaint by increasing the complaint counter by 1, setting the Opt-in (email) to "No," and setting the status to "Blacklist."

When is it possible?

The following two properties are about whether or not a customer record can be sent an email.

• Hard bounce/Soft bounce

If the delivery of a previously sent email content to a customer record is unsuccessful, it results in a 'bounce.' The term "bounce" comes from the fact that the email content essentially 'bounces back' from the receiving email provider to Deployteq. Depending on the reason for this 'bounce' (e.g., because the email address does not exist or the mailbox is full), it is determined whether it is a hard bounce or a soft bounce.

If a customer record has 1 or more hard bounces, it cannot be emailed anymore. This does not apply to soft bounces. In the case of soft bounces, a customer record can still be emailed with up to 4 soft bounces. Only when there are 5 soft bounces, the record cannot be emailed.

Important: 5 soft bounces do not automatically become 1 hard bounce. These are two separate statuses.

• Marital Status

This may seem unusual, as you might not expect it to affect the sending of email content. However, one of the statuses for this field is "Deceased," and in that case, it makes no sense to email the customer record. So, if this field is set to "Deceased," you cannot send email content via a bulk mailing to this customer record.

Exceptions

There is an exception to the five situations mentioned above:

If the sending process sends 1 email content to 1 single customer record, it is considered a "single mail." In this case, the five situations mentioned above are ignored. The reason for this is that typical single mails, such as order confirmations, password reset emails, or signup confirmations, must always be sent. Single mails are typically sent ad-hoc, at the moment the customer initiates an action, and are not scheduled in advance in large quantities.

However, if there are more than 1 customer in the selection, regardless of how this selection was made, the above exception does not apply.