Custom Status and Status Codes

You may have noticed a contact in your database has an email status set to Custom.

This can mean a variety of things:

• The contact may have an invalid email address.
• The email address may be temporarily inactive.
• The contact has marked your emails as spam.

Contacts with a Custom email status will be automatically skipped in future marketing campaigns sent from Force24.

What do the status codes mean?

In the Force24 system, different numerical codes define the underlying status of a contact:

Email status codes

• 1: Active
• 2: Unsubscribed
• 3: Hard Bounced
• 4: Invalid Email Address
• 5: Exclude by Client Rule
• 6: Temporary Inactive
• 7: SPAM Complaint
• 8: Bounced by BouncelessIO
• -3: Over 5 Spam/Soft Bounces without Activity
• 9: Bounced by data upload process—Email address bounce list
• 10: Bounced by data upload process—Domain rejection list
• 11: Contact has been erased

SMS status codes

• 1: Active
• 2: Unsubscribed
• 3: Bounced
• 4: Invalid SMS
• 5: Exclude by Client Rule

Direct mail status codes

• 1: Active
• 2: Unsubscribed
• 3: Returned Address Unknown
• 4: Returned Unwanted
• 5: Exclude by Client Rule

These codes are no longer visible in the standard status fields, as we now use friendly labels like Active, Unsubscribed, Bounce, and Inactive. However, you can identify the underlying code through the URL of your Contact Search. For example, when searching for an email status, you will see a parameter in the page URL:

You can manually replace the number in the URL with any of the specific codes listed above to filter for those exact records.

How status codes map to frontend views

While many codes group neatly into standard UI categories like Bounce (such as codes 3, 8, 9, and 10), any status that does not fit neatly into Active, Unsubscribed, or Bounce will display on the frontend as Custom (such as codes 4, 5, 6, and 7, alongside code -3 in certain circumstances).

Please note that status code 11 (erased contacts) behaves differently: these contacts are excluded from Contact Search entirely. If you attempt to access an erased contact's profile directly, it will return a 404 error, except during the erasure process itself where the profile may display "contact is being erased" instead of a name.