Bounces of emails is part of
your total delivery. But is important to understand why this happen and how to avoid.
In this
article, you’ll learn:
What is an email bounce?
An email
bounce (or “bounce”) is an error you receive when your email has not reached the destination. normally you receive an
automated message (Non-Delivery Report (NDR). from e-mail
server with details talking about the specific problem.
To understand bounce back
emails you need to know what are the steps to deliver an email.
What causes an email to bounce back?
There are some reasons for a email bounce back: fake email addresses, full inboxes, non-existing e-mail addresses, not responding servers.
Those reasons
can be temporary or permanent. and you must know how to troubleshoot bounces, first you need to understand each type of bounce:
The are three types of bounce backs that disrupt the delivery of your email are:
1. Hard bounce emails.
2. Blocklisted emails.
3. Soft bounce emails.
1. Hard bounce emails
A hard bounce happens when your email is permanently undeliverable to an email address.
The Reasons for a hard bounces include:
- Fake email address
- Incorrect email address
- Email blocked: Some domains (like governmental or institutional) have stricter spam filter settings.
It's not possible to fix hard bounce issues. What you can do is remove those hard bounced addresses from list. If you don’t start doing this, you have high risk of your emails being blocklisted.
2. Blocklisted emails
Nearly 88% of emails are considered spam.
Email blocklists are created by ISPs (Internet service providers) to filter harmful content, like malware or spam.
3. Soft bounce emails
Emails soft bounce happens when a server rejects an email temporarily. Most email services try to resend email messages after they soft bounce.
Reasons for a soft bounce include:
Mailbox full: If a recipient has too many emails and reaches capacity limit, your email will bounce back until there’s free space.
Email size: If you pack emails with megabyte-heavy images or include huge attachments, it might be bounced back if there’s a related filter in place
Server is down: An unreachable server may have crashed, been overloaded, or been under maintenance. This means you must wait to send the email to the address again.
Autoreply: If someone goes on vacation and sets an auto reply, your email will often bounce back.