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.