Why you’re getting an out of office for a non-contact in Mailchimp

I’ve recently been asked by a few of my clients as to why they are receiving out-of-office email replies from contacts that aren’t in their Audience (B.T.W. you can easily stop receiving out-of-office replies from your Mailchimp email marketing). An email campaign is sent from Mailchimp and an out-of-office reply is received. When the Mailchimp account holder looks for the contact in their Audience they can’t locate the contact at all; the email address isn’t unsubscribed, cleaned, archived or anywhere.

The reason that you may receive out-of-office replies from people you didn’t send to is likely that the original person that you sent to had a forward or redirect on in their mailbox. If a contact that you send to redirects/forwards their email then Mailchimp has no way of knowing that the email was redirected but still accepts the out of office reply.

Unfortunately, at present, with so many people’s work situations having changed in a small space of time, there are all sorts of redirects and forwards going on with email 🙁