This article explains hard and soft bounces, common delivery errors in cold email automation, why they occur, and how to fix them.
Bounces are email delivery errors that occur when emails fail to reach their intended recipients and are returned to your inbox.
Before we start, here are brief steps on how to identify bounces:
a) Send a test email from your primary email address (which sends campaigns) with your usual email content to your other email address.
If you receive a bounce-back message in your inbox, open the delivery error report and review the information.
b) Check your inbox for undeliverable emails. These emails typically have subject lines such as “Mail Delivery Subsystem” or “Your message couldn’t be delivered.”
Examine the bounce reports for any recurring patterns or errors.
Bounce reports from email providers help determine the specific reason why the email could not be delivered.
Moving forward, we will outline the most common bounce examples to help you fix and avoid them in the first place.
Bounce types
There are two main categories of delivery errors: hard bounces and soft bounces.
Based on what type of bounces you get more often, you can take necessary actions to fix them and decide whether to continue sending your campaign bounced emails.
Hard bounces
A hard bounce is a permanent delivery error. Any future attempts to send emails to that email address will most likely fail again.
1) Address not found
This delivery happens when the recipient’s email address is invalid or the email account was deactivated.
How to fix: The email address couldn’t be found because of a typo or the email address does not exist.
→ Verify your recipients list to clean it from invalid or outdated emails.
2) Message blocked
This bounce occurs when the recipient’s email server rejects incoming emails.
- If a recipient has a spam filter which checks email components (subject lines, email content, any emails that don’t meet the spam filter criteria will be blocked.
- If the recipient’s email server has a policy to block emails from certain sender IP addresses or domains, emails will be automatically rejected.
How to fix: Emails can be blocked for various reasons. Check the error description in the bounce report.
Soft bounces
Soft bounce is a temporary delivery error and the email might still be delivered successfully after you fix the issue or retry.
1) Message not delivered: When the recipient’s server isn’t able to accept the email.
This delivery error happens due to a temporary server error or connection timeout while sending the email.
2) Recipient inbox full
It happens when there is no more space in the recipient’s email client for new incoming emails or when it receives too many emails at the same time.
3) Delivery incomplete: When the recipient’s server is temporarily down or unavailable.
Like the “Message not delivered” error, emails cannot be delivered if the recipient’s server doesn’t respond.
Usually, your email provider will try to resend the email automatically a few times.
4) Daily sending limit exceeded
This delivery error happens when you reach the daily/hourly sending limit set by your email provider.
5) Email size is too large
Your email exceeds the maximum size limit allowed by the recipient’s email server.
How to prevent bounced emails
Lots of bounced emails can really damage your reputation as a sender. Make sure to handle it right to avoid harming your deliverability and campaign results.
# Verify emails before launching campaigns
Use the built-in email verifier tool to check emails in your list before starting campaigns. Unverified emails have a much higher chance of resulting in delivery errors.
# Monitor your bounce rate
Snov.io automatically detects bounced emails in active campaigns and stops sending the sequence to that recipient.
Read how to troubleshoot high bounce rate issue →
# Take care of your sender reputation
The root cause of many bounces is a low sender reputation, which causes receiving email servers to reject emails.
A low sender reputation is caused by factors such as poor engagement, high complaint rates (when recipients report emails as spam), and a lack of domain configuration.
Read Email best practices → to improve your reply rate, one of the main metrics for better sender reputation and campaign success.
# Authenticate outgoing emails
Email service providers also check authentication to evaluate senders’ reputation. Emails that fail authentication checks may also bounce.
To authenticate your emails, set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records in your domain’s settings.
# Test deliverability before sending campaigns
With Snov.io’s Deliverability check, you can troubleshoot and fix various issues that affect your inbox placement.
You can also check your sender domain settings (DNS records) and make sure your email content follows the recommended practices.
Go to the Deliverability check page.
Click Get started and create a test.
If you have a question that we haven’t covered, feel free to reach out to our Customer Care team. You can contact us at help@snov.io or through live chat. We’re here to assist you!