Have you ever gotten a call from someone in your church system complaining that they have not been receiving emails? You may have even called us to ask what was going on. We are able to look up in Sendgrid.com the status of emails and why they might be blocked.

But now you'll know yourself! We have been meaning to do this for a long time. We are now getting notified of bounces, spam reports and dropped emails. And, we are recording those and forwarding them to the sender. It will be up to you and them to resolve whatever reason for the failed mail. The reason will be reported in the notice you receive. This should make it much easier to keep your database full of good email addresses.

For some, it will be an obvious misspelled domain name or a badly formatted email address and those will be easy to fix. For others, the report may be that the email address does not exist anymore. Still easy, but you should probably try to reach out to the person another way, perhaps give them a call. Finally, it may be that they have complained that you are spamming them and clicked the "Junk Mail" link on their email client. If that happens, you probably just need to remove their email from the system. They don't want to hear from you evidently.

The next step in making this even easier to use is to give you control over whether to unblock the email on Sendgrid since they stop sending to such recipients when there are problems like this. There is good reason for that, it helps us maintain a very good reputation as a good citizen in the mass email sending community. We'll get put on a blacklist if we were to keep sending emails to bad addresses. So once we see that it is bad, we stop. So eventually, you will have control over whether you want to unblock these emails and give them another try. You should probably wait until you have communicated with the recipient and figure out what the problem is on their end.

Bottom line, you are going to start getting notices from time to time on failed emails from BVCMS. Now you know what's going on.