Maybe you already read about bounce or hard bounce. If it’s not the case, we advise you to read them to get a better idea.
At Mailpro, we classify “soft bounce” emails if the email was not delivered for a temporary reason. We will try to deliver again, after a couple of hours before we put them in this category.
Soft Bounce Emails will still remain in you address book or list, so your audience will still receive you emails in the next campaign.
We have XY categories of “soft bounce”:
- No-answer-from-host
In this specific case, we know that the remote server will receive the email because he has a valid Mail Exchanger (MX) whose IP we could find through the Domain Name Server (DNS)
- Bad-Connection
The remote email server answers, but the connection fail for some reasons. We try to resend after 7 minutes and 45 minutes
- Quota-issues
Mostly, the mailbox is full, so we cannot send more email. It can also be when the email is too big, and you could reduce the size of the email
- Protocol-error
This would be any kind of SMTP protocol error, such as SMTP Servers don’t understand each other. This is pretty rare.
- Routing-error
This rare case can happen while we try to deliver an email “very far” in the web and the email passes through too may routers or fail to reach the destination server because of a router problem. This is what routing errors are about.
- Bad-configuration
Your message was not delivered because of a configuration problem with the remote email server.
- Content-related
The content of the email is not appropriate for the mailbox. This could happen with some attachments which might not be allowed, so you can add download links to your newsletters like we do with Mailpro. Also some links that are going to some phishing webpages, even spam words can block the delivery of the email.
- Spam-Related
We can write here pages of different type of spam filters, when we have an answer with “spam” we know the email was filtered and not delivered.
What you can do? Check your content, no spam words, not too many links, don’t use a free domain name sender email, personalize your message. Also, some email servers don’t like to receive too many emails with the same content. Read more about how to avoid spam filters.
- Invalid-sender
Some servers use SPF or DKIM email authentication. You can configure your domain with Mailpro. Read about : How to configure SPF, DKIM, DMARC.
- Message-expired
After we retry several times to resend the email, it will arrive in the expired email category. It’ll stay on your address book and list for future sending.
- Policy-related
This category is when we receive an error talking about policies of the recipients server. It one these 12 soft bounce points you are reading about.
- Virus-related
This will not happen with Mailpro, as we do not send attachments, but we host the file and make a link or button. But we could imagine an answer in which the email was not accepted because the anti-virus or corresponding email server founded a virus.
What you need to understand is, if you send 100 emails with different domains, behind, there is 100 email servers configured in different ways even though there are some rules (to be RFCs Compliant) that everybody should apply, it’s not always the case.