In your reports, you may see "bounces" but what are they?
A 'bounce' means that your email was sent to a specific address, but the mail server that received the email for that person has sent it back, saying it could not be delivered.
Soft Bounce
A soft bounce is an email message that gets as far as the recipient's mail server (it recognizes the address) but is bounced back undelivered before it gets to the intended recipient. A soft bounce might occur because the recipient's mailbox is full, the server is down or swamped with messages, or the message is too large.
If an email has soft bounced in the last 5 campaigns without any trackable activity like an open or a click (and if those 5 campaigns took place over more than 2 days) it will automatically be converted to a hard bounce and be removed from your list.
Hard Bounce
A hard bounce is an email message that has been returned to the sender and is permanently undeliverable. Causes include invalid addresses (domain name doesn't exist, typos, changed address, etc.) or the email recipient's mail server has blocked your server.
Servers can sometimes interpret bounces differently, meaning a soft bounce on one server may be classified as a hard bounce on another.
Our email sending application automatically moves subscribers that hard bounce into a "Bounced Subscribers" category, so they don't receive future campaigns.
Here's a full rundown of other types of bounces you might see:
What Can You Do?
- Keep your subscriber lists clean, check each list for incorrectly formatted addresses, invalid domains and typos
- Use double opt-in, allowing each address to be validated by the subscriber before it can be added to your list
- Monitor delivery rates by domain such as AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, Earthlink and others
- Test your emails by sending your campaign to your entire list, send a test to yourself and others
