Inappropriately quarantined

[HAlumni]

We are just getting started with Hubspot. We are a youth organization that hosts an annual 3-day seminar for high school sophomores. We just imported a list of contacts that includes previous seminar participants and their parents that goes back to 2007. This is absolutely a list of people familiar with our organization, who have given consent to being contacted. Unfortunately, it didn't occur to us to run the list through a list validator prior to sending our first marketing email. We sent a marketing email yesterday with a high bounce rate (because we have a lot of students who are no longer at the high school they attended when they came to our seminar) and now our entire list is quarantined! We are not a B2B organization - it makes absolutely no sense for us to try to send one-on-one emails (and hope for a reply!) to 2000 contacts. 

If Hubspot can't fix this for us, we will be leaving for another platform. 

[MiaSrebrnjak]

Hi @HAlumni,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community! 

The HubSpot Email Marketing tool has several automatic protection measures in place; including list quarantines, to protect both individual senders from reputation damage and to keep the HubSpot network healthy for everyone who depends on it.  High rates of hard bounces will damage a sender's ability to reach the primary inbox and also degrade HubSpot's email reputation score.

The purpose of the quarantine is to prevent more bounces from happening and causing further negative impact. A contact can be removed from the list if they reply to a one-to-one sales email sent from a connected inbox, you can find more information in this Knowledge base article and this Community post. When a contact is quarantined in a HubSpot Free account and doesn't reply to a one-to-one sales email, it will, unfortunately, remain ineligible for email indefinitely.

Other Email Service Providers in the industry implement similiar measures to enforce a maximum threshold on bounce rates established by ISPs (Internet Service Providers). It's therefore recommended to use contact list validation vendors like Kickbox to identify and remove invalid contacts from your lists before the send.

Hope this helps. 

Mia