We wanted to give you an update to let you know of an upcoming change in our data retention policy for bounce events. These changes will go into effect on April 1st (yes, really).
As mentioned in our current data retention policy, after 45 days we remove all original message content and metadata from our system. For bounce reports, however, even though we remove the original message content after 45 days, metadata and the content of the actual bounce message have historically been retained for up to 1 year to enable troubleshooting.
In order to simplify our data retention policies, and also make sure that we do not keep data for longer than necessary, we are planning to make a change to this policy. As of today, new bounces will be deleted from our system 45 days after they are received. In short, our updated data retention policy has been simplified so that after 45 days we remove all original message content and metadata from our system, with no exceptions.
With this change, you will no longer see bounces older than 45 days when searching in your Activity feed, but you will always be able to see a searchable, full list of suppressed addresses within the Suppressions tab. Since bounces reactivation has historically been tied to BounceIDs, it has been necessary for customers to query for bounces, get a special BounceID, and then use the `/reactivate` endpoint with that ID. Depending on your workflow, reactivating bounces after 45 days using this process will no longer work. But, we’ve got you covered:
With the recent release of our Suppression UI and API you can easily search for inactive addresses, see the reason the address is inactive (block, hard bounce, etc.), and reactivate the address if possible. We recommend using this new API for all address reactivations, because it only requires one API call, rather than two, and will ensure addresses are reactivated, regardless of the suppression reason.
To Summarize:
As always, if you have any questions or concerns about any of these changes, please let us know.
