Understanding Contact Types in SendFox

SendFox automatically labels every contact by their engagement and subscription status, so you can segment, clean your list, and protect your deliverability. Here’s what each type means.

Engagement status

SendFox tracks how recently each contact has engaged and shows one of these statuses:

• New — recently added and sent to within the last 90 days, but hasn’t opened a campaign yet.
• Active — has opened a campaign in the last 90 days (about three months). In the list status filter and on your dashboard, these are also called “Engaged subscribers.”
• Inactive — hasn’t opened a campaign in the last 90 days.
• Invalid — SendFox has determined the address can’t be sent to (for example, it has bounced before or the address/server doesn’t exist).

Subscription status

Separate from engagement, a contact also has a subscription status:

• Confirmed — opted in through a Form, a Smart Page, or the API and clicked the confirmation link in their double opt-in email.
• Unconfirmed — signed up and was sent a double opt-in email but never confirmed. If your account uses double opt-in (the default on every plan), SendFox won’t send campaigns to unconfirmed contacts until they confirm.
• Unsubscribed — either clicked the unsubscribe link, or was automatically unsubscribed after a hard bounce to an invalid address.

Bounces

A bounce happens when an email can’t be delivered and is returned by the receiving mail server. There are two kinds, and both can trigger Optimization.

Soft bounce

A temporary delivery failure — for example, the mailbox is full, the server is briefly unavailable, or the message is too large. SendFox may succeed if it retries later.

Hard bounce

A permanent delivery failure because the recipient address is unreachable — for example, the address doesn’t exist or the domain doesn’t exist. An address that hard bounces this way is automatically unsubscribed. SendFox does not unsubscribe a contact when the failure is on the sending side — a temporary provider block, or a domain-authentication error (SPF, DKIM, or DMARC) — because those don’t mean the recipient address is bad. Those bounces are still recorded, but the contact stays subscribed.

Troubleshooting

Should I re-subscribe a bounced contact?

• No. Never re-subscribe a contact that has bounced — sending to invalid addresses harms your deliverability. Only re-subscribe contacts who have given you permission. See Resubscribe and Unsubscribe.

My emails aren’t reaching everyone

• Unconfirmed, unsubscribed, and invalid contacts are excluded from sends. See Why are my emails not being sent to everyone on my list?

Questions? Reach the SendFox team through the Help Center.

Frequently asked questions

What’s the difference between Active and Inactive?

Active contacts (also shown as “Engaged subscribers” in the list filter and dashboard) have opened a campaign within the last 90 days; Inactive contacts haven’t opened one in that window.

Why can’t I email my unconfirmed contacts?

When double opt-in is in use, contacts must confirm their subscription before they can receive campaigns — this keeps your list permission-based and your deliverability healthy.