All you Need to Know About Soft Bounce

Bounce or bounce-back, is a term associated with an email returned back to the sender after being rejected for delivery due to some reasons. The reason for bounce-back can be made out from the description provided in the bounce type itself.

There are two types of bounces, Hard Bounce and Soft Bounce. In case of hard bounce, an email remains permanently undeliverable, due to the reasons mentioned in the previous post. However, in case of soft bounce, it’s a temporary problem where the message gets bounced due to unavailability of the email server or inbox being full.

In soft bounce, the sender’s email reaches the mail server and the mailing address is also recognized by the recipient’s mail server, yet the mail is bounced back undelivered before reaching the recipient. There are many reasons due to which, an email may be soft bounced:

• Server is down
• Mail server is swamped with messages
• Recipient's mailbox is full
• User has abandoned the mailbox
• Message is too large

In most cases, a soft bounce message may be redirected manually to the recipient's domain by the network administrator or delivered at another time. Generally, an attempt is made to deliver the email regularly for a few days as the email address is valid, however, if even after several attempts it remains undelivered, it becomes a soft bounce.

There are different types of hard and soft bounces, which will be explained in the next post.

Improve email deliverability with Hard Bounce Management:

When an email gets returned to the sender and remains permanently undelivered, it is known as a hard bounce. This can happen for a number of reasons such as:

• Invalid email addresses

• The email does not exist anymore

• Some typing error

• The recipient’s email server has permanently blocked your email

In a nutshell, bounce is an email that is returned to the sender due to some reason or the other. There can be technical reasons that act as a hindrance. The email infrastructure identifies the delivery problem occurred and sends an informative email to the sender stating that the email has not got through. This is also known as the bounce message.

Many a times the system might keep your undelivered messages on hold and will try to send them again later. You will get a mail from your system stating that the following addresses failed to receive your email.

Such temporary problems are usually handled by your email system in various ways. It also depends on the nature of the problem along with the services you are using to deliver your email.

The only good thing about bounce back messages are most of the time you get a message that your email has not reached the following email addresses and has not been delivered. This gives you ample of scope to take appropriate action.

B2Bdatapartners’ smart hard bounce management tool removes all bounce messages. It eases your burden of correcting the invalid addresses. Our proprietary hard bounce management tool can scrub your existing customer database by verifying it against our in-house master data file.