Dealing with invalid email addresses
If you attempt to send an email to a certain address and your email bounces, the recipient's email address will be marked as invalid. In the Contact Record, you'll see the email address is now underlined in Red and there's a Red exclamation mark next to the address. If you hover your mouse over this exclamation mark, it'll reveal the error message we received from the recipient's server.
When you enter an email address to a Contact Record, Rex performs a very basic vaildation of the address. If it's been entered incorrectly, (a comma instead of a full-stop, for example) it'll imeditately be underlined in Red with the error message 'The email address 'example@email.com' is not a vaild email address.'
The first thing to do, is check that the email address is correct. Look for any obvious mistakes that you can correct. In most cases, you'll want to contact the person and request their correct email address.
Errors can also occur if you paste the email address - sometimes pasting the address will put a space at the start of the email which you can't see. To fix this, you need to follow the below steps.
- Go to the Contact record
- Cut the email address from the text box
- Click 'Save Changes'
- Paste the email address back into the text box
- Click 'Save Changes'
Once you've tried this you can attempt to send an email merge again.
If this doesnt work, you may want to remove the email from the bounce list (for example; the Contact's inbox was full and not accepting messages when you emailed them). If you're certain it's a valid email address, you can remove it from the bounce list like so;
- Go to the Contact record
- Hover over the email address
- Click the drop-down button
- Select 'Mark as Valid'
Once you've marked the address as valid, you can attempt to send an email merge again. If the message continues to bounce, there's an issue with the Contact's server, as it's denying the message. You'll need to get the recipient to contact their email provider.
If the Contact doesn't have a valid email address, you obviously can't send them an email. If a Contact's email address is marked as invalid, the system will remove the "primary email address" flag from that email. You cannot send an email to a Contact that doesn't have a primary email address set.
To set the primary email address:
- Hover your mouse over the email address and click the action arrow
- Select 'Set Primary' from the drop down menu
Here is a video to take you through this in more detail:
Please Note: If a blocked error comes back again after this Mark as Valid action is performed, please reach out to our support team to investigate further. It will most likely mean that the client has marked your emails as spam or their email provider security settings are high.