Quarantine quarantine-management

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 versus denylist

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 delivery. 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

Why is an email, phone or device sent to quarantine quarantine-reason

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:

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.

Soft error management soft-error-management

As opposed to hard errors, soft errors do not send an address to quarantine immediately, but instead they increment an error counter. When the error counter reaches the limit threshold, the address is quarantined. Learn more about retries and error types in Understanding delivery failures.

The error counter is reinitialized if the last significant error occurred more than 10 days ago. The address status then changes to Valid and it is deleted from the list of quarantines by the Database cleanup workflow. Learn more about technical workflows.

Access quarantined addresses access-quarantined-addresses

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

Quarantines for a delivery delivery-quarantines

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:

Learn more about delivery reports in this section.

Non deliverable and bounce addresses non-deliverable-bounces

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.

In addition, the Non-deliverables and bounces built-in report, available from the Reports section of this 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 quarantined-recipient

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 remove-a-quarantined-address

Automatic updates unquarantine-auto

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:

Their status then changes to Valid.

Manual updates unquarantine-manual

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

Bulk updates unquarantine-bulk

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

To perform a bulk update:

The addresses will then be automatically removed from the quarantine list by the Database cleanup workflow and can be included in future deliveries.

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