Hard bounces vs soft bounces

When an email is rejected by a subscriber's email server, it's called a bounce. There are different types of bounces that depend on the reason the email bounced. These details can be found in your email report. It's a good idea to keep a close eye on your bounces to be sure your campaigns are reaching your subscribers, and that you're abiding by spam laws

Hard Bounces

A hard bounce indicates a permanent reason an email cannot be delivered. In most cases, hard bounced email addresses are removed automatically and immediately from the active subscribers and placed in the Bouncebacks list under your contacts. Hard bounced subscribers will be excluded from future email sends to your contacts. While there are many reasons an email address may hard bounce, below are some common reasons this could happen.

• Recipient email address does not exist (sometimes this can just be a misspelling)
• The domain name does not exist.
• Recipient email server has completely blocked delivery.

Note

There are occasionally cases in which valid email addresses can hard bounce or a subscriber could mistakenly unsubscribe and will need to opt back into your list.

Soft Bounces

Soft bounces typically indicate a temporary delivery issue to an address and are handled differently than hard bounces by eMerge. When an email address soft bounces, it will immediately display as a soft bounce in the email report.

If an email address continues to soft bounce in additional campaigns, the address will eventually be considered a hard bounce and removed from your list. We'll allow several successive soft bounces for an email address before converting a soft bounce into a hard bounce. While there are many reasons an email address may soft bounce, below are some common reasons this could happen.

• Mailbox is full (over quota).
• The recipient email server is down or offline.
• The email message is too large (too many images, or actual length).

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• If you still have more questions, don't hesitate to reach out to our support team.