Sending Email in GC Outreach: Failures, Retries, and What to Do About Bounces

Overview

When you send emails through GiveCampus Outreach, not every email reaches its destination on the first try. Some emails bounce immediately, others get delayed temporarily, and most deliver successfully. This article explains what happens when an email can't be delivered and what you should do about it.

How Email Delivery Works

GiveCampus uses SendGrid to deliver your emails. When you hit send, your email goes through several stages:

Email Statuses You'll See

• Pending – Not sent yet
• Submitted – Handed off to SendGrid, in the process of sending
• Sent – Successfully delivered to the recipient's inbox
• Opened – Recipient opened the email
• Clicked – Recipient clicked a link in the email
• Bounced – Email was rejected (usually a bad email address)
• Spam Reported – Recipient marked the email as spam

What Happens When Delivery Fails

There are two main types of delivery failures:

1. Deferrals (Temporary Failures)

A deferral happens when the recipient's email server can't accept your email right now, but might be able to later. Common causes:

• The recipient's inbox is full
• The email provider's server is down or overloaded
• The server is temporarily blocking your IP address due to high volume

What GiveCampus Does: SendGrid automatically retries delivery for up to 72 hours using an exponential backoff algorithm (meaning more time passes between each retry attempt). Most deferred emails eventually get delivered. If finally sent, a deferral will move from Bounced to Sent. 

What You Should Do: Nothing. Deferrals usually resolve themselves. Keep these contacts on your list.

2. Bounces (Permanent Failures)

A bounce happens when an email is permanently rejected. Common causes:

• Invalid or non-existent email address
• The domain doesn't exist
• The recipient's server has permanently blocked delivery

What You Should Do: Remove bounced email addresses from your list. They won't work, and continuing to send to them can hurt your sender reputation.

Why high bounce rates sometimes happen with imported data

Imported email lists often include outdated records. This isn’t a delivery issue with GiveCampus; it’s a data hygiene challenge. Your first campaign after a migration can reveal the quality of the new list.

What this means for your outreach:

• Expect it: The initial campaign may expose outdated records that no longer reach recipients.
• Re‑apply suppressions: Legacy filters aren’t automatically transferred. You need to identify and remove previously suppressed or invalid addresses.

Practical steps to reduce bounce impact:

1. Test a small sample: Send to 1–2% of your contacts or a few hundred records to gauge your bounce rate before committing the full list.
2. Review campaign reports: Wait 72 hours for deferrals to resolve, then remove persistent hard bounces.
3. Segment risky contacts: Separate domains or contact types that consistently bounce until you can verify their details.
4. Cross-reference with your CRM: Compare bounced addresses in GiveCampus with your CRM and suppression lists to ensure they remain suppressed.
5. Clean your lists regularly: After a migration, perform an initial cleanup and schedule periodic reviews to maintain list quality.

Why cleaning matters:

Maintaining a clean list improves overall deliverability. Repeated sends to invalid addresses can trigger broader throttling. Use your first campaign as an opportunity to remove hard bounces and isolate problematic contacts, setting the stage for improved performance in future sends.

Recommended Actions for Your Team

After Each Campaign

1. Wait 72 hours to allow deferrals to resolve to either sent or bounced 
2. Review your email report in GiveCampus for bounced contacts
3. Remove hard bounces from future sends (these addresses won't work)
4. Monitor spam reports and consider removing those contacts or adjusting your content

Best Practices

• Clean your email lists regularly to remove old or invalid addresses
• Watch for patterns (e.g., multiple bounces from the same domain might indicate a broader issue)
• Don't immediately remove contacts who had a single deferral (their server might have just been temporarily down). This is why you should wait the full 72 hours.

Current Limitations

Right now, GiveCampus doesn't have a dedicated report for pulling bounced email addresses across all outreaches (like we do for the Invalid Numbers report for GC Outreach Texting). This means you'll need to manually review outreach results to identify bounces.

Solution: Export your email campaign results and filter for bounced statuses, then cross-reference with your constituent database.

We're exploring ways to improve bounce reporting and make this process easier in the future.