The Quizzical Quagmire of Bounced Email Befuddlement: A Curious Expedition into Digital Delve

By *Bill Bryson and Chris Drayer

Hello, dear real estate readers, and welcome to another curious foray into the baffling world of the digital landscape. Today, we embark upon a journey through the perplexing labyrinth of the enigmatic enigma of bounced and spam email deliverability. Grab your magnifying glass and a sturdy cup of tea or coffee – for we are about to unravel the intertwined tales of electronic epistles gone astray.

SPAM (not canned)

Picture this: you’re sipping your morning beverage of choice, anticipating correspondence that carries the aroma of meaningful conversations. Yet, instead, your inbox is inundated with an assortment of suspicious solicitations – emails peddling pharmaceutical marvels, princely inheritances, and enigmatic promises of unholy riches. This, my friends, is the audacious world of spam emails – those cybernetic pests that have invaded our digital sanctuaries.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve often found myself pondering the curious minds behind these digital missives. Who are these devious devils that concoct such creative tales of fortune and dubious delight? One can’t help but marvel at their resourcefulness, albeit misdirected. But worry not, for amidst this swampy terrain of spam, there are valiant spam filters and vigilant email providers striving to keep our (and your clients) inboxes safe, if not entirely pristine.  Similarly – should you wish to send simple salutations you ought to be safe, but mass marketing may materialize as malicious, and thus leave you sorrowful, and sorted into spam.

Bounce House Emails
Alas, even in the quest to vanquish the nefarious spam, a new conundrum emerges: the case of the bounced emails. You see, my inquisitive companions, just as messages undesired infiltrate our domains, messages intended for delivery sometimes meet their own mysterious end – bouncing back like a rubber ball launched with excessive exuberance. It’s as if the digital ether itself is toying with our attempts at communication.

Bounced emails, you see, come in different flavors – the ‘soft bounce‘ which might occur due to a temporarily full mailbox or a momentarily unresponsive server, and the ‘hard bounce’ that signals an email’s permanent inability to find its intended recipient. Now, ponder this: in a world where technology whirs at the speed of thought, how can an email, a mere whisper in the digital tempest, meet such insurmountable obstacles? The very idea is as confounding as it is intriguing.

But, fear not, for like a valiant knight in a digital realm, solutions do exist. It turns out that nurturing healthy sender-receiver relationships, tending to email lists like an attentive gardener, and ensuring that your emails are crafted with the finesse of a skilled wordsmith can go a long way in avoiding the treacherous pitfalls of bounced emails. And let us not forget the modern-day wizards – the email delivery experts who decipher the cryptic languages of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to ensure our electronic missives find their way to their intended destinations.

So, there you have it – the tangled tapestry of spam emails and the bewildering world of bounced email deliverability, unraveled, examined, and pondered upon. As we venture further into this digital epoch, remember to tread cautiously, for amidst the shimmering mirage of cyberspace, tales of triumph and tribulation await the curious and vigilant alike. Until next time, my fellow explorers, keep your emails packed with purpose and prevent them from bouncing!

Yours quizzically,
Bill Bryson (or at least, a digital echo thereof)

*Conclusion
AI, SPAM and Bounced Emails:

In my work, there are things I love doing and things I hate doing.  Sound familiar? So I hate talking about bounced emails and spam.  Its just boring to me.  Unrelated, I’m a big fan of leveraging AI to do things that are difficult, time consuming and …. Boring.  Just like how Revaluate identifies likely movers to call on, so agents don’t have to call everyone in their database.  So I asked Chat GPT AI to help me write the above blog post.

In Chat GPT I typed: “ write a blog post about bounced email deliverability problems and solutions in the style of bill bryson “ Then spent 30 min cleaning it up and editing.   Bill Bryson (A walk in the woods is one of my favorite reads)

I also had canva’s AI create an image of “Bill Bryson holding a laptop on fire” … That image is not as good as the post IMO.  And frankly, I enjoy working in Canva to create images without the AI.

So – Did you like the post? Do you view it as cheating to use ChatGPT AI to write / co author a blog post? What about the AI generated image – is that cheating? What about utilizing Revaluate AI to identify likely movers in your database is that cheating?  I’d argue no, and I feel pretty strongly about this position.  AI enables greater efficiency – for you and your competition. What’s your take? LMK in the comments. 

Bounce, Spam and Scores
Now – the question we get all the time, and the reason for the topic, is: Why or how can Revaluate score a bounced or spam email? Now that you know the definition (thanks to Bill GPT) the answer is: that email might work for someone else…. Its could be that your email is black listed, causing the email not to be delivered.  This is caused by repeated red flags from your email provider that then turn your sending email account into a black listed email.  Perhaps the next thing to do is to start with a new email provider.

Death and Scores
Secondly, one of the life events that causes people to move very frequently is death.  Death and many of these life events we monitor will require additional care and respect from the agent.  These are tough times for the family.  Even after a contact passes, the email address may continue to score highly for months.  While this may seem unusual, from a data perspective as an input to our AI, it’s incredibly valuable on a large scale.  On an individual level, each one ought to be handled individually with care and compassion that top agents exhibit.  Also, for what its worth, it is very uncommon for these types of moves to happen quickly – rather in this case, that process frequently takes time.

Oh, and Bill GPT – TYVM for the post.