When I compare the count of a segment I created to the number of people who receive the mailing, the counts are off.
Environment:
Outreach/Feedback, Counting a Segment
Resolution:
When you use the Count / Calculate feature to determine the number of contacts included in your mailing audience, contacts that have invalid email addresses are automatically excluded from the count. The count involved with the segment can change over time due to new contacts added to the application and email addresses becoming invalid based on other mailings.
Note: This can also occur when you upload contacts. If the record already exists in the database and if the email address is flagged as invalid, the number of contacts you upload may be significantly greater than the number of contacts with valid email addresses.
For example, if you upload 1,000 contacts to a list, when you view the contacts in the list, you will see all 1,000 contacts. However, say that 100 of the records already exist in the database and have an invalid email address. When you calculate the count for the list, only 900 will be listed since those records are not flagged as invalid.
Oracle B2C Service Outreach automatically flags email addresses that result in a hard bounce as invalid. These display in the console with a red exclamation point. For more information on the types of bounces that can result from mailings, refer to Bounced E-mail message handling.
In addition, if the audience is created so that a contact is included multiple times in the audience, that contact is counted only once. The outbound mailing will only be sent once to contacts that are included multiple times in a mailing audience.
When you look at the delivery statistics for a specific mailing, these values are fixed based on the transactions that occurred for a specific mailing. The report does not filter out records that currently have invalid email addresses. You can use the Mailing Delivery Analysis report to get delivery and bounce statistics for a specific mailing.
Therefore, at the time the mailing was sent, a contact's email may have been valid, but at a later time, another mailing may have been sent to that contact that created a hard bounce and that email address was then flagged as invalid. When that happens, the count associated with the segment as determined by the Count / Calculate feature will differ from the number of non-bounced emails sent from your report.
For example, the delivery statistics for a mailing might show that 3210 emails were sent with 825 hard bounces. This results in 2385 emails that were not hard bounces.
If you then calculate the segment size, the segment size will most likely be close to 2385, though it might not match exactly. Several contacts are included in multiple segments, and if a mailing was sent that resulted in a hard bounce, the contact record would be flagged with an invalid email address. Since the email address was valid at the time of the initial mailing, the static results from the report would not reflect the current status of the record. As a result, the calculated segment count would exclude the contact record whose email address was later flagged as invalid.
