Concept

Email bounces and suppression

When a course email is permanently undeliverable, Alva Courses records the failure and stops sending that address the monthly digest. Repeatedly mailing dead addresses is what damages a sending reputation, so this protects the mail your other students still need to receive.

What counts as permanent

• The receiving server says the mailbox does not exist.
• The address is not a deliverable address at all — malformed, or rejected outright.
• The recipient marked the message as spam.

What does not suppress

• Temporary failures — a full mailbox, a server asking us to try later, a DNS blip.
• A network-level block by the receiving provider, which is usually about reputation rather than the address.
• A message that was delivered and then filtered into a spam folder. That says something about the message, not about the mailbox.

The asymmetry is deliberate. Suppressing a reachable address silently cuts a paying student off from their course email, and nobody notices; leaving a dead one in the list only wastes a send. Anything ambiguous is left alone.

Where you see a bounce

Open the student in Members and look at the Email History card. A recorded bounce shows that message with the status Bounced, beside its date, type and course.

What suppression stops

The monthly digest, for that address at your store. Course email the student is entitled to — enrolment, completion and certificates — is still attempted through the primary provider but no longer falls back to the backup transport, so a genuinely dead address keeps appearing in Email History as a failure rather than disappearing quietly.

Reaching that student again

A bounce is recorded against the address, not the person, so the fix is a working address. Ask the student for one, open them in Members, click Edit email under their address, enter the new one and save. The new address carries no bounce history, and the student keeps their enrolments and progress.

Saving also changes the email on their Shopify customer, which is the address they sign in to your store with, and future course emails go to the new address. Click Resend Email to send their enrolment email there. Alva Courses refuses an address that another member or Shopify customer of your store already uses.

If the email is changed on their Shopify customer instead, Alva Courses updates the member to match, so course email follows it there too.

See also

Read about the monthly progress digest, improve deliverability by sending from your own domain, or diagnose a single missing message in enrolment email not received.

Last updated 2026-10-13