Actually, because CU*Answers sends email on behalf of all of its clients, bad email addresses hurt all of us! Every month CU*Answers sends nearly 100,000 e-statement notifications. We send a couple hundred thousand It's Me 247 online banking notices. We send Member Reach newsletters on behalf of 80 credit unions. We send a lot of email. (And it’s email that your members want to receive!)
Unfortunately, if enough emails are returned as invalid addresses, large Internet Service Providers start to notice and will even start blocking delivery of our messages. We know you want your messages to arrive in your members’ inboxes. We certainly want to get those messages to your members, and your members want to get those messages from you.
Emails sent to invalid addresses cause our collective reputation as a responsible mailer to plummet. In fact, in April of 2023 a large spam detection service actually blocked our ability to send any emails for any clients for a period of several days! So we all need to be careful to keep email address lists cleaned up. That's the reason for some of our bounce-back cleanup procedures (see related links below) and the Wrong email address flag, and why we continue to invest in servers, software, and daily monitoring routines that follow today's best practices and be polite to the rest of the Internet, keeping our good reputation as a responsible mailer intact. We reserve the right to adjust any email address (either a "to" address or a configured "from" address) that could potentially cause problems with these third-party mail monitoring services.