Active vs Inactive Contacts

Viewing a list of Active contacts, Inactive contacts, or both, is accomplished in the Contact Status Column.  The Status column indicates whether or not you are able to send messages to a particular contact. If you are able to send messages to a contact, then they will have a status of Active. Active contacts are “live” contacts that can receive messages from you. If you cannot send messages to a contact, then they are Inactive and given one of three status types described below:

• Bounce – The Bounce status indicates that you cannot send messages to this contact because they have received a hard bounce due to bad email address, or they have exceed the bounce limit for your account.
• Unconfirmed – Contacts with a status of Unconfirmed have not yet agreed to receive your messages. Remember, one of our policies is that contacts must agree to receive your messages in order for you to send to them (i.e. they were sent an opt-in invitation but have not yet agreed to receive your messages).
• Unsubscribed – Contacts with a status of Unsubscribed have either unsubscribed themselves from receiving messages from you, or were unsubscribed by you.  They can also be considered unsubscribed if they click the “This Is Spam” link in certain ISPs (such as Yahoo! or Hotmail).

Woops! Reactivating An Inactive Contact

Sometimes a contact is made Inactive by mistake.  One example of this could be someone testing the unsubscribe link during email test sends.

To reactivate an inactive contact:

1. Locate the contact using the search function on the All Contacts page, or by clicking the Inactive tab on the table on the All Contacts page.
2. Once you have located the contact you wish to reactivate, click on the email address associated with that contact.
3. On the Contact Overview page, click the Activate button to reactivate the contact. This will give the contact a status of Active.
4. An important note! You once again need to get permission to send mail to the contact via a subscription confirmation. There is no way to reactivate a large number of contacts at once. This is largely due to the seriousness of a unsubscribe request and the legality of re-subscribing someone who has unsubscribed.

Rob Slade
Client Support Specialist at Bronto

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