What about a sudden increase in email bounces? In these cases, most ESPs will attempt delivery a few more times in case circumstances change and then stop if the email continues to bounce.īounced back emails are just one of many possible outcomes when sending an email – read our ultimate guide to email metrics to better understand your email stats.

There isn’t any one solution for soft bounces, but the email still can’t be delivered to the recipient’s mailbox at that point in time. What kind of temporary circumstance? Anything from the email message being too large to the recipient’s email server being down. On the other hand, soft bounces (temporary failures) cannot be delivered due to some kind of temporary issue. Instead, we use this hard bounce as a reminder to prompt them to update their valid email address another way, either in-app or using a CPaaS method.

The customer still wants to hear from you, so deleting their record would mean losing a customer. Suddenly, you receive a hard bounce from this email address. Instead, emails that hard bounce should be added to a suppression list ( Mailgun does this automatically).Ĭonsider this scenario: your customer changes ISP from Yahoo to Gmail and forgets to update their email account on your system. Deleting customer data is not recommended. If it has nowhere to go, not even we can deliver it.Ī common misconception is that nothing you do will change this bounce, so some senders think it’s best to just throw those email addresses off your lists or CRM. Most email providers – Mailgun included – will stop attempting to send hard bounce messages after the first attempt. Common reasons for hard bounces are invalid email addresses, the receiving server no longer exists, misspelled domain names or recipient addresses, etc. Hard bounces, also known as permanent failures, mean that the message is undeliverable due to some sort of unchangeable, permanent reason. There are two types of bounces you can run into when sending email - hard bounces and soft bounces. You will usually receive an auto-reply to your message that gives you a reason for the non-delivery.

Email bounces (which make up part of your total delivery) occur when an email cannot be delivered to a recipient’s inbox.

Email bounce back message example