The Backstory: You send an email to a key contact on an active deal, and the message bounces back, but your CRM still shows them as reachable. Rather than manually tracking down failed deliveries and updating records yourself, you rely on the Backstory Email Bounceback Detection feature to handle this automatically.
Email Bounceback Detection automatically identifies when an engaged contact's email address stops accepting messages and marks that contact as inactive in your CRM. The feature scans incoming bounce signals, verifies them against recent activity, and updates a dedicated field on the Contact record in Salesforce. This gives sales reps an early signal that a contact may have left a company, helping teams maintain cleaner data and focus outreach on active relationships.
Note: Configuring Email Bounceback Detection requires a Backstory administrator account.
Enable Email Bounceback Detection
These steps walk you through creating the required Salesforce field and requesting enablement from Support.
In Salesforce, create a new boolean field on the Contact object and name it email_active (or your preferred custom field name). Then add the new field mapping in Backstory. See Map a Custom Salesforce Field to Backstory for detailed instructions.
Contact support@backstory.ai and request they enable email bounceback detection. Provide the name of your custom field in Backstory.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Backstory confirm a bounce is real and not an out-of-office reply?
After detecting language in an email that suggests delivery failure, the system checks whether any new outbound activity from that contact has occurred. If activity is found, the bounce is not confirmed, so temporary issues like out-of-office messages are not incorrectly flagged as bounces.
How often does Backstory update the email status field in Salesforce?
The system updates the email_active field in Salesforce daily, but only for contacts who have had no new data from the CRM and no new activities in the past seven days.
Does a bounced email mean the contact has left the company?
Not necessarily. A bounce can be caused by many reasons, and most are soft bounces, such as temporary delivery errors, that are not strongly correlated with a contact departing a company. A bounceback is a signal worth investigating, not a definitive confirmation.
Will the email status reset if the contact becomes reachable again?
Yes. If a new outbound email is successfully sent from the previously bounced email address, Backstory reverts the email_active field back to active and updates all Contact records associated with that address.
Need Help?
Contact your Customer Success Manager or support@backstory.ai.