OK so looking at this contact

1. they were opted out using 'REPLY MAIL BLOCK'
2. we updated their email in CiviCRM to be on_hold
3. we put them on the master suppression list based on their email being on hold in CiviCRM.

This would make sense if their email was permanently undeliverable - but otherwise not.

So firstly I want to confirm with @bsisolak if we can get a better definition of what 'REPLY MAIL BLOCK' means. Also, how does Acoustic deal with bounces? It must mark these people somehow

Some random other thoughts

• we could stop telling Acoustic that people who are on hold in Civi should be suppressed
• In some cases CiviCRM would get the bounce before Acoustic does - ie in response to the thank you email - in these cases there might be some benefit in telling Acoustic - but Acoustic would quickly put them on hold anyway
• Civi by default has 2 options for 'on_hold' (yes or no). It can be updated to have 3 (no, bounce, user opt out)
• there is also a hold_date field which could be used for temporary hold

This user was opted out by Civi, not Acoustic. Looking at the Opt Out Details field, the value is Opt Out Via ListImport. The timestamp is 11/22/2024 9:02. It appears Civi is opting out users with REPLY MAIL BLOCK, which is not something it should be doing. Transient bounces are separated into Soft Bounces and Mail Blocks, based on teh details of the message.

This was a Civi bug Katie uncovered in 2022, when we opted back in 28,912 records that Civi had opted out. I found one email that referenced this, but maybe the bug is back.

@bsisolak I don't think this was ever 'fixed' - I found Katie's doc but it didn't result in us implementing any chances

But I guess what I'm hearing is that we probably should NOT update the email address in Civi to on_hold based on a REPLY MAIL BLOCK from Acoustic because we don't have enough information to know if it is transient or not?

All REPLY MAIL BLOCKS are transient and should not result in an opt-out. Once that is fixed, we need to figure out how to identify records Civi has opted out as a result of this issue. We might want to consider opting them back in.

Change #1119212 had a related patch set uploaded (by Eileen; author: Eileen):

[wikimedia/fundraising/crm@master] Stop putting REPLY MAIL BLOCK emails on hold

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1119212

Change #1119212 merged by jenkins-bot:

[wikimedia/fundraising/crm@master] Stop putting REPLY MAIL BLOCK emails on hold

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1119212