Soft Bounce Changes Decrease List Churn

TL;DR: Tatango changed how we handle soft bounces which means less phone numbers will be proactively cleaned from your lists.
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For years Tatango has taken actions to ensure your lists remain well maintained. For phone numbers that are no longer active or if a number experienced an issue too many times, Tatango would take a proactive action. Those issues are called bounces and there are two types: Hard and Soft.
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Hard bounces are easy to handle. If a customer sent to a number and the carriers tell Tatango that the number is no longer valid, we "clean" the number by removing it from your list and every other Tatango list. If one customer sends to an inactive number, no reason to let others do the same.
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Soft bounces on the other hand are a little more complicated. There are lots of reasons a message might soft bounce. Just two reasons are the subscriber may have blocked your code or the phone may have been powered off for too long causing the carrier to stop trying to deliver the message. In the past, if a number reached 7 days of soft bounces, Tatango would "clean" the number from all lists across all customers.
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​We have revisited our handling of soft bounces, changed our policies and are seeing positive results.

The new process continues to count soft bounces BUT if a number has a successful message delivered, Tatango now resets the bounce count back to zero. This raises the bar for a number to be proactively removed. In other words, if a number bounces 6 times and then receives a successful message, the bounce count is reset to 0 and it would take another 7 days of bounces to have the number "cleaned".

The end results is that fewer numbers are being proactively cleaned from lists across Tatango's entire customer base. In fact, last week was the lowest week of the year for "cleaned" subscribers! You work hard to build your list and Tatango wants to make sure we are not taking actions that hurt your efforts. If you have any questions, please let us know.