Why a message was skipped: bounces, complaints, and releasing an address

Open a sent message and some recipients may be marked skipped rather than sent. Most reasons are the plain ones: no email address on file, opted out, no texting consent, a paused person. This article is about one more — an address that the email company refused, or that somebody reported as spam. Those addresses get parked, and they stay parked until a person sorts them out.

Two things that park an address

• A hard bounce. The email company tried and the address does not exist — a typo, a closed account, a deactivated mailbox. It is permanent, and no amount of resending will change it. (A soft bounce — a full mailbox, a server having a bad morning — parks nothing; the provider simply retries.)
• A spam complaint. The person clicked "this is junk" in their mail app. Whether or not they meant it about your parish, continuing to write to them is what gets a whole parish's mail blocked, so Vianney stops.

Either one is recorded automatically. Nobody has to notice it and do something.

What being parked means

• Every later message skips that address, with the reason written into the results — never a silent drop, and never a quiet retry behind your back.
• Parking is per address, not per person. It does not touch group membership, consent, opt-out records, or anybody's channel preference. Fix the address and the person carries on exactly as before.
• Texting is different: a failed text never parks a number. Stopping texts is consent, and that lives with the person's STOP handling.

Repairing and releasing

• 1. Open the message and find the card headed What the provider reported. It lists each event with the time, the address, what happened (delivered, hard bounce, complaint), and the provider's own detail.
• 2. Sort out the underlying problem first — correct the address in the person's record, or ring them and ask for a better one. Releasing a parked address without fixing it just bounces again.
• 3. Click Release suppression on that row. Vianney asks you to confirm and records who released it, when, and any note you leave.

Releasing never resends anything. The message that was skipped stays skipped. If the person should still get it, send it again as a new message with its own confirmation — that is the same no-auto-send rule that governs everything else in Connect.

Good to know

• The What the provider reported card only fills in once your parish's email provider is connected and its event feed is switched on. Until then the card isn't there at all, rather than showing zeros that would read as bad news.
• "Sent" in a message's results means the provider accepted the copy from us. What happened next — delivered, bounced, complained about — is what this card tells you, and the two are deliberately kept apart so a delivery problem is never mistaken for an app problem.
• Where a skip reason mentions suppression, the wording tells you what to do: repair the address, then release it in Connect.
• Other skip reasons and what they mean are covered in Choosing how a message is delivered and Understanding group and message insights.