Documentation Campaign Campaign v8 Documentation

Quarantine

Last update: March 7, 2024

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Adobe Campaign manages a list of quarantined addresses for online channels (email, SMS, push notification). Some internet access providers automatically consider emails as spam if the rate of invalid addresses is too high. Quarantine therefore allows you to avoid being added to denylist by these providers. Moreover, quarantines help reducing SMS sending costs by excluding erroneous phone numbers from deliveries.

When their address or phone number is quarantined, recipients are excluded from the target during delivery analysis: you will not be able to send marketing messages, including automated workflow emails, to those contacts. If those quarantined addresses are also present in lists, they will be excluded when sending to those lists. An email address can be quarantined, for example, when the mailbox is full, if the address does not exist, or if the email server is unavailable.

Quarantine applies only to an address, a phone number, or a device token, but not to the profile itself. For example, a profile whose email address is quarantined can update their profile and enter a new address, and could then be targeted by delivery actions again. Likewise, if two profiles happen to have the same phone number, they will both be affected if the number is quarantined. The quarantined addresses or phone numbers are displayed in the exclusion logs (for a delivery) or in the quarantine list (for the entire platform).

On the other hand, profiles can be on the denylist as after an unsubscription (opt-out), for a given channel: this implies that they no longer being targeted by any. As a consequence, if a profile on the denylist for the email channel has two email addresses, both addresses will be excluded from delivery. You can check if a profile is on the denylist for one or more channels in the No longer contact section of the profile’s General tab. Learn more

NOTE

When recipients report your message as spam or reply to an SMS message with a keyword such as “STOP”, their address or phone number is quarantined as Denylisted. Their profile is updated accordingly.

Why is an email, phone or device sent to quarantine

Adobe Campaign manages quarantine according to the type of delivery failure and its reason. These are assigned during error messages qualification. Learn more about delivery failure management on this page.

Two types or errors can be captured:

Hard error: the email address, phone number or device is immediately sent to quarantine.
Soft error: soft errors increment an error counter, and might quarantine an email, phone number or device token. Campaign performs retries: when the error counter reaches the limit threshold, the address, phone number or device token is quarantined. Learn more.

In the list of quarantined addresses, the Error reason field indicates why the selected address was placed in quarantine. Learn more.

If a user qualifies an email as a spam, the message is automatically redirected towards a technical mailbox managed by Adobe. The user’s email address is then automatically sent to quarantine with the Denylisted status. This status refers to the address only, the profile is not on the denylist, so that the user continues receiving SMS messages and push notifications. Learn more about Feedback loops in the Delivery Best Practices Guide.

NOTE

Quarantine in Adobe Campaign is case sensitive. Make sure to import email addresses in lower case, so that they are not retargeted later on.

Access quarantined addresses

Quarantined addresses can be displayed for a specific delivery or for the entire platform.

Quarantines for a delivery

Quarantine addresses are listed during the delivery preparation phase, in the delivery logs of the delivery dashboard.

For each delivery, you can also check the Delivery summary report: it shows the number of addresses in quarantine in the delivery target, and displays:

The number of addresses placed in quarantine during the delivery analysis,
The number of addresses placed in quarantine following the delivery action.

Non deliverable and bounce addresses

To view the list of quarantined addresses for the entire platform, Campaign Administrators can browse to Administration > Campaign Management > Non deliverables Management > Non deliverables and addresses. This section lists quarantined elements for email, SMS and Push notification channels.

NOTE

Number of quarantines increase with time. For example, if the lifetime of an email address is considered to be three years and the recipients table increases by 50% each year, the increase in quarantines can be calculated as follows:

End of Year 1: (1*0.33)/(1+0.5)=22%.

End of Year 2: ((1.22*0.33)+0.33)/(1.5+0.75)=32.5%.

In addition, the Non-deliverables and bounces built-in report, available from the Reports section of ths home page, displays information about the addresses in quarantine, the types of error encountered, and a failure breakdown by domain. You can filter data for a specific delivery, or customize this report as needed.

Learn more about bounce addresses in the Deliverability Best Practice Guide.

Quarantined email address

You can look up the status of the email address of any recipient.

To do this, select the recipient profile and click the Deliveries tab. For all deliveries to that recipient, you can find out whether the address failed, was quarantined during analysis, etc.

For each folder, you can display only the recipients whose email address is in quarantine, with the Quarantined email address built-in filter, as below:

Remove a quarantined address

Addresses that match specific conditions are automatically deleted from the quarantine list by the Database cleanup built-in workflow.

The addresses are automatically removed from the quarantine list in the following cases:

Addresses in a With errors status will be removed from the quarantine list after a successful delivery.
Addresses in a With errors status will be removed from the quarantine list if the last soft bounce occurred more than 10 days ago. For more on soft error management, see this section.
Addresses in a With errors status that bounced with the Mailbox full error will be removed from the quarantine list after 30 days.

Their status then changes to Valid.

CAUTION

Recipients with an address in a Quarantine or Denylisted status will never be removed, even if they receive an email.

You can also manually remove an address from the quarantine list. To remove an address from quarantine, you can:

Change its status to Valid from the Administration > Campaign Management > Non deliverables Management > Non deliverables and addresses node.

You might need to perform bulk updates on the quarantine list, for example in case of an ISP outage during which emails are wrongly marked as bounces because they cannot be successfully delivered to their recipient.

To perform this, create a workflow and add a query on your quarantine table to filter out all impacted recipients so they can be removed from the quarantine list, and included in future Campaign email deliveries.

Below are the recommended guidelines for this query:

Error text (quarantine text) contains “Momen_Code10_InvalidRecipient”
Email domain (@domain) equal to domain1.com OR Email domain (@domain) equal to domain2.com OR Email domain (@domain) equal to domain3.com
Update status (@lastModified) on or after MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS AM
Update status (@lastModified) on or before MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS PM

Once you have the list of affected recipients, add an Update data activity to set their status to Valid so they will be removed from the quarantine list by the Database cleanup workflow,. You can also just delete them from the quarantine table.

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