What does it mean that my import had policy issues?

Policy issues during import indicate that your email list contains a significant number of undesirable email addresses. We can’t mail to these addresses. This will create reputation and deliverability issues for you and all customers using our platform. We use shared IP channels for all our customers, and using risky email addresses may affect not only your own deliverability but also the deliverability of all our other customers.

What types of addresses can cause policy issues?

The policy-issue category includes several types of problematic email addresses:

• Bounces, invalid domains, or user-unknown errors
• Email addresses listed on internal or external blocklists
• Email addresses of frequent complainers
• Addresses based on role

Usually, these indicate that the list is poor quality, isn’t permission-based, or has gone stale.

Please double check that you’re not importing unsubscribes, or emails that have already bounced during your previous mailings (for instance, user unknown bounces). The majority of ESPs make this data available upon export.

How can I fix my list?

First of all, you need to establish whether the list is permission-based. In other words, each and every contact should give their explicit permission to receive emails from you. Also, permission was granted no earlier than 6 months ago, if there was no contact with the list in the meantime. If you collected the list more than 6 months ago and never emailed it, the list is stale and permission isn’t valid anymore.

Make sure your contact database is up to date. Import rejections often happen because the list wasn’t properly maintained, or is simply very old and went stale. Neglected list hygiene increases the probability that the list contains faulty addresses.

We suggest extracting the freshest part of the list. In other words, select only those contacts that you obtained within the last 6 months, or those who opened any of your messages in that time. This may help drop the addresses that caused your import to be rejected. Try importing the fresh part of the list to see if the import succeeds.