Email bounces

What do you do when a message from your email campaign bounces back from your users’ email addresses? First, let’s define and troubleshoot the two types of email bounces: hard bounces and soft bounces.

Hard bounces

A Hard Bounce is when an email fails to deliver to the recipient due to a permanent delivery error. A hard bounce might occur because the domain name doesn’t exist or because the recipient is unknown.

For more information, see Hard bounce.

Soft bounces

A Soft Bounce is when an email fails to deliver to the recipient due to a temporary delivery error, even though the recipient’s email address is valid. A soft bounce might occur because the recipient’s inbox is full, the server was down, or the message was too large for the recipient’s inbox.

If an email receives a soft bounce, we will usually retry within 72 hours, but the number of retry attempts varies from receiver to receiver.

While soft bounces aren’t tracked in your campaign analytics, you can monitor the soft bounces in the Message Activity Log. Here, you can also see the reason for the soft bounces and understand possible discrepancies between the “sends” and “deliveries” for your email campaigns.

To learn more about managing your email subscriptions and campaigns, check out Best practices for email.

Still need help? Open a support ticket.

Last updated on May 2, 2024