How to create an "accurate" hard bounce list?

[mjanicki]

Hey all,

I used the Hubspot email bounce tool to create a list of hard bounced contacts. I was surprised at how many there were, but upon further inspection I found that it was including contacts who may have bounced once a while ago but had received the last few emails and opened them. 

How can I create a hard bounce list that only includes hard bounced users who never stopped bouncing? I figured I could create a parameter that filtered out anyone who had a "delivered" email within a certain period but I couldn't find such a property.

Here are the rules I chose when creating the original list mentioned above: 
Thanks!

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @mjanicki,

Are you sure that emails are going through to contacts who have hard bounced? HubSpot automatically excludes these contacts from sends – unless they're unbounced: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/email/how-can-i-send-an-email-to-a-contact-that-has-previously-bounced

To answer your question, it's key to understand how HubSpot handles the Email hard bounce reason.

HubSpot keeps the value in the Email hard bounce reason even if the contact has been since unbounced. That's why these contacts will still show up when you create a list and filter for Email hard bounce reason is known, for example. There also isn't any property documenting the date of the email hard bounce. This would be helpful because we could then determine whether the Last marketing email send date (the most recent email delivery) was after the bounce date.

There are two workarounds I can think of:

Option 1

You create a custom date property Email hard bounce date and stamp this date in a workflow, enrolling contacts based on whether their Email hard bounce date is known (only enrolling contacts who meet the trigger criteria starting now, otherwise all "old" contacts would be stamped with today's date). This allows you to create a list of all contacts whose Email hard bounce date is after the Last marketing email send date – contacts that have apparently not been unbounced and are not eligible for receiving emails.

There is a downside to this option: It only works once (not for multiple hard bounces) and it won't get you historical information.

Option 2

You create a custom radio select property Unbounce status with the options Unbounced and Not unbounced. Whenever someone unbounces a contact, they would have to manually change the value of this property into Unbounced. You could then exluce contacts with the value Unbounced from the list that is filtering for Email hard bounce reason.

If you feel strongly about having better hard bounce features, I'd recommend posting them in the HubSpot Ideas section of the community: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/idb-p/HubSpot_Ideas

Hope this helps!