When your emails get "bounced" — meaning that your subscriber's inbox politely says to try again later, due to low storage or rate limiting — we've tracked and surfaced that for a while in the various email analytics views. Now, that data is surfaced on the subscribers page too: you can filter and view your subscribers by bounce_date and bounce_reason directly, both as filter options and as table columns.
"What's the difference between bouncing and undeliverability?", you ask. Oh, my sweet summer child.
Buttondown only marks a subscriber as undeliverable after we've seen enough deliverability problems to be confident the address is dead. A single bounce isn't enough — sometimes inboxes are full, sometimes a server is misbehaving, and the subscriber's perfectly fine the next day. Tracking bounces separately means you can see those soft signals long before we make the call to stop sending.
A couple of ways this comes in handy:
- Catch trouble early. Filter for subscribers who bounced in the last week to see who's wobbling. If the same address keeps showing up there, you can decide to remove them yourself rather than waiting on us.
- Combine with engagement filters. Layer the bounce filter on top of open and click rate filters to find the subscribers who are technically reachable but not really engaging — the kind of audit that's worth running once or twice a year.
- Resend or tag problematic cohorts. Want to resend yesterday's time-sensitive missive to folks who didn't get it? We won't do that for you — for obvious reasons — but you can, now more easily than ever!
Both filters live in the existing filter menu on the subscribers page, and you can flip them on as columns via the table customization menu. Reach out if anything's confusing.