Why are some U.S. House contact email addresses being marked as inactive?

In an effort to preserve your email deliverability, the U.S. House is notifying us of any Feedback Loop complaints they receive and any invalid recipient addresses they are alerted to in response to your outbound emails from the CRM. 

What is a Feedback Loop?

When a recipient designates an email as spam, this is considered a complaint. Some email service providers allow senders to sign up for Feedback Loops, or FBLs, which provide the sender a message from the recipient who complained. The House receives this message and forwards it to us so that we can suppress the reporting email address in the database.

Why are we marking these email addresses as inactive?

The more spam complaints you get, the more likely email service providers will look at all of your email as suspect, which increases the chances that they will stop delivering your email to everyone they provide services to, in essence "Blacklisting" you. To decrease additional opportunities for your mail to be marked as spam, we are inactivating any email address that receives a Feedback Loop complaint. Marking an email address as inactive renders the email address unusable in the CRM's database until/unless a staffer in your office manually changes the email address back to active (not advised). Additionally, invalid email addresses will also be marked as inactive.

How will we know which contacts' email addresses were inactivated for which reason?

We will apply two (2) pieces of information to every contact whose email address is inactivated as a result of the Feedback Loop:

1. The contact will be given a personal code spam_report_inactive
2. A note will be added to the record that reads "This contact designated our office emails as spam on or around [datehere]."

We will apply 2 pieces of information to every contact whose email address is inactivated as a result of being an invalid email address:

1. The contact will be given a personal code invalid_email
2. A note will be added to the record that reads "This email was reported by the House as invalid on or around [datehere]."

These actions will provide you with several options when working with contacts:

1. You can create filtered folders and saved searches that either search for or suppress contacts with this personal code.
2. You can suppress these contacts when creating a search for mass mailings.
3. You can color-code the personal code.
4. You will see the descriptive note in the Overview when accessing your contact's history.