I have a email campaign where I sent out several thousand newsletters. I had several hundred error with "Soft-errors". I have opened up several support tickets, but there are no answers, nor suggestions. They all say the soft-errors will try three times, then flag as a hard error. That is NOT what is happening. They are not flagged even after a few WEEKS. I want to remove these dead contacts, but there is no way to export, flag, or do anything than see them on the report.
In looking at the SMTP response on the soft errors, it is clear that many are NOT soft-errors. In my support tickets, I have included the smtp headers, thinking that would help solve the issue. here is a stripped down header:
Action: failed
Status: 5.1.1
Remote-MTA: dns; inbound-221555-mail1.customer.frontbridge.com
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550 5.1.1 User unknown
--9881FB40102.1347318658/mail126-co1-R.bigfish.com
Content-Description: Undelivered Message
Content-Type: message/rfc822
And just for the record, here is the rfc error description:
550 - The requested command failed because the user’s mailbox was unavailable (such as not found)
Question 1:
What do I have to do to get these several hundred emails pulled from my list?
Question 2:
Why are they not being hard-bounced ?
Question 3:
This "3 retries" rule is apparently not functioning, so what option do I have to remove or flag them?
I even went so far as to create a chained-campaign and sent emails to the un-opened, and these several hundred still persist to plague me.