Glossary

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), enacted by the United States Congress, is a 1996 regulation that protects patients’ health information and medical histories. The Act restricts health institutions from passing on this information to anyone without the patient’s consent and knowledge. It lays out three main rules concerning data privacy, data security, and data breaches. HIPAA is the forerunner of data protection regulations like the more recent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by the EU and the California Consumers Privacy Act (CCPA).

There are two types of email bounces: hard bounces and soft bounces. While soft bounces are temporary delivery outages that often resolve over time, hard bounces are permanent delivery failures to recipients’ inboxes.

An email header is a snippet of code that always precedes the email bodyt. It contains information about an email and its journey from the sender to the recipient and valuable feedback about the sender’s deliverability, including the following: