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What does Student CRM do if an email or SMS fails to send?
What does Student CRM do if an email or SMS fails to send?

When a soft or hard bounce are detected, this is how the system responds

Steph Stevens avatar
Written by Steph Stevens
Updated over a week ago

SMS Failures

When an SMS fails to send, we receive a notification from our SMS provider. The CRM will mark the mobile number as failed by adding the red X icon:

And the logs will show the error responsible for the failure:

Email Failures

When an email is sent to a student using Student CRM we receive feedback from the email service provider (ESP). This feedback allows us to decide if we should continue to use this email address.

The feedback on undelivered email is called a 'bounce' and it comes in two types:

A hard bounce is where the system is told that we cannot deliver mail to that address. It's a permanent problem. An example would be where the mailbox does not exist or has been deleted. Or perhaps where the email address has been mistyped and cannot be sent to at all.

In this circumstance, the CRM will mark the email address as failed by adding the red X icon:

If the email address is tried again, it'll be ignored, and marked as dropped on email reports.

You may find older hard bounced emails have been deleted, however this is no longer the case for Student email addresses.

Both these status were implemented so that these emails can never be used to send a communication. The student's logs will display the Bounced status:

A soft bounce is where we're told that the inbox at that email address is temporarily unavailable. It may be that the inbox is full or the server is offline for some reason.

When a soft bounce is recorded, the email send will be reattempted until it finally sends.

You can see the attempts for each email Grab or Touchpoint within the Student Database record for each student, under Full Logs.

If you have any questions about this, please get in touch with the Customer Support Team.

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