In the past, every email which was not delivered, was called a badmail, mainly because the user or domain was not found or it was misspelled.
We would receive an alert saying that it had been categorized as a “bad email address”.
Now, in Mailpro, when delivering your emails, we interpreted badmail as a “not delivered email” , which is also called a “bounce”.
The bounce emails are classified into two different categories, The Hard Bounce and the Soft Bounce. What is the main difference between hard and soft bounce? Mainly, if it’s a permanent or temporary bounce.
What is “hard bounce” in email marketing?
Well the hard bounce is when an email is permanently not deliverable. For example, a bad domain name, if the domain doesn’t exist, or if it’s impossible to resolve the DNS to deliver the message to the domain mail server. Also if the user of a mail domain is unknown. For example, if that person no longer works at that company, the IT guys will delete that mailbox.
What is “soft bounce” in email marketing?
Soft bounces are emails which are temporarily not deliverable. For example, a mail server that is currently out of order will have a “host not reachable” error and we will try to deliver it 3 more times within the day.
Another example can be the “mailbox full” which we classify in “quota-error”. In this case, we cannot send the mail now, and we will retry but it’s possible the email cannot be delivered and we will consider it soft bounce.
Hard Bounce |
Soft Bounce |
| Permanent Error | Temporary Error |
| - Invalid email address (user, domain unknown) |
- Mailbox full - Server out or order - Email too big - Content or Spam Filtered |
You also need to know that emails considered Soft Bounce and will not be removed from your lists. We also classified as Soft Bounce all the emails which get filtered and didn’t pass anti-spam (very often because of content), as bounce, or not delivered.
Read about what causes Soft Bounce in Mailpro
Also read:
Our blog post on How to create a newsletter that pass the anti-spam filter
Our FAQ on Spam words you should avoid when creating your emails
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