Blocked Email List Only Available to Gainsight Support

100% – I had to open a support ticket last week to resolve an issue where the intended recipient was not receiving emails sent out of Gainsight (emails showed as dropped/bounced/rejected), but showed as a valid email on the email validator tool, and was very upset (and was receiving emails from their account team).

Per Gainsight support, the email was on the Sendgrid bounce list – which Gainsight support has access to, but we do not.

I need to add this as an idea (and a best practice post), because unfortunately the only existing workflow if we know an email is not receiving communications and should be is to open a support ticket, which seems like a huge waste of time for all involved parties.

Hi ​@erin.power 

We use Emails Logs V2 to do some reporting as well. The BOUNCE TYPE and BOUNCE REASON will give you more information.

SOFT BOUNCES are recipient server side rejections, meaning the contact’s email service decided your email wasn’t appropriate. This isn’t a true rejection of a bad email address (HARD BOUNCE), but the server being ‘safe.’

We tend to get around this by asking our clients to white list our emails; but we are also a much more hands on Customer Success team. The email service that Gainsight uses monitors a reputation score for you (https://support.gainsight.com/gainsight_nxt/01Onboarding_and_Implementation/Onboarding_for_Gainsight_NXT_in_Salesforce/Login_and_Permissions/Email_Service_Configuration#Reputation_Score_Calculation). This impacts how safe email servers see your emails. 

Adding the ​@dayn.johnson answer above, I believe the issue is that removing emails from the Sendgrid block list hurts your reputation very negatively. 

We definitely need a way to manage bounces better, especially when we know the recipient is valid.

Yep, it’s much easier to tell if the email shows as on the deny list in the email validator tool. At least that way you can confirm with the CSM or account rep whether the email in question is valid before removing them – and can also explain why they didn’t receive a particular email if they had previously opted out of receiving those types of communications.

It’d be nice if we were able to at least see whether an email was on the Sendgrid bounce list as part of the email validation tool, even if we weren’t able to actually edit it. Our team has access to the Sendgrid portal, but that’s not through Gainsight, nor does it give us those admin-level permissions.

Ohh, this explains so much!
Will keep this caveat in mind moving forward