Seeing one too many bounceback messages in your inbox lately? Not to worry – with the proper bounceback treatment plan, you’ll have those emails dancing right into recipients’ inboxes in no time.
This comprehensive guide covers everything, from diagnosing the root causes of email bouncebacks, exploring the damaging effects left untreated, and prescribing actionable solutions for prevention and rehabilitation. Follow these expert tips on list hygiene, inbox monitoring, reputation building, and more to build resilience against delivery failures.
Wave goodbye to bounceback headaches and finally embrace smooth, reliable email deliverability once and for all!
What is an Email Bounceback?
If you’ve sent many emails in your day, you’ve likely encountered the dreaded bounceback message. But what exactly does it mean when an email bounces? Let’s break it down.
An email bounce occurs when the intended recipient server rejects or fails to accept your message. This results in the email getting kicked back to you, the sender.
Bouncebacks can happen for a variety of technical and logistical reasons which we’ll cover shortly. The main point is – no bounce is a good bounce when it comes to your email deliverability.
The Two Main Types of Email Bounces
Bouncebacks come in a few flavors, but can be broadly categorized into two main types:
- Hard bounces – A permanent failure that prevents delivery to the recipient address. The email address is invalid or inactive. These bouncebacks usually include “failed” or “undelivered” in the error message.
- Soft bounces – A temporary failure that blocks the message. The address is likely valid, but unable to receive mail at that moment. Soft bounces may eventually resolve on their own. Messages typically say “retry” or “delayed.”
Think of soft bounces are recoverable injuries, while hard bounces require total amputation from your list!
To demonstrate the difference, here are examples of common hard vs. soft bounce errors:
Hard Bounce Errors
- 550 Recipient rejected
- 550 Invalid recipient
- 550 No such user
Soft Bounce Errors
- 452 Insufficient system resources
- 451 Server unavailable
- 550 Mailbox full
Ideally, you want to keep both types of bounces to a minimum to maintain your sender reputation and list hygiene. But pay extra attention to any hard bounces you get, as those need to be removed entirely.
Breaking Down the Bounceback Message
When an email bounces, the recipient server will generate an automatic non-delivery report (NDR) explaining the issue. This bounceback message then gets sent back to the email address used to originally send the mail.
These notification messages will include helpful details like:
- The specific error code and description
- Originating and destination IP addresses
- Date/time the bounce occurred
- Headers from the initial failed message
For example, a typical bounceback might look like this:
Hi, this is the qmail-send program at mx.example.com.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.
<[email protected]>:
550 5.1.1 User unknown
--- Below this line is a copy of the message.
Return-Path: <[email protected]>
Received: (qmail 32552 invoked by uid 89); 11 Oct 2022 12:45:48 -0000
Date: 11 Oct 2022 12:45:48 -0000
From: John Doe <[email protected]>
To: Bob Smith <[email protected]>
Subject: Test Message
Hi Bob,
This is a test email to check deliverability.
JohnIn this example, the key details are:
- Permanent hard bounce (given up, user unknown)
- Error 550 – meaning the user/address doesn’t exist
- Date/time of the bounce
- Header snippet containing the From, To, Subject etc.
So if you receive a bounce, be sure to review the full message for clues. There are also tools like MxToolbox that can analyze headers and error codes for you.
Understanding common bounceback messages and causes will help you properly diagnose and address deliverability issues. With a healthy list and proper authentication, you can get your emails hitting the inbox again!
Why Do Emails Bounce Back?
Like a stubborn boomerang, email bouncebacks have a funny way of coming back to senders.
These return-to-sender messages indicate your email failed to reach the intended recipient. But why exactly do bouncebacks happen? There are a number of potential causes.
Understanding the root reasons can help you diagnose and prevent future delivery failures. Let’s explore the most common sources of bounced emails.
Invalid or Mistyped Email Addresses
One straightforward bounce trigger is an outright invalid or mistyped email address.
If you accidentally switch two letters or omit a domain extension, that address won’t exist on the recipient server. Any emails sent to a fictional user like [email protected] or sarah.jones@organization are guaranteed to bounce.
Likewise, if you’re emailing a misspelled or outdated address that’s no longer active, bouncebacks will occur. Bad data is often to blame here – if you purchased an old list, harvested addresses without double opt-in, or didn’t properly scrub your contacts.
The takeaway is ensuring every address is valid, verified, and typed correctly. Maintaining your list hygiene is the number one bounce prevention tactic.
Inactive or Closed Email Accounts
Even a properly formatted email can bounce if the account is no longer active. This frequently happens:
- When employees leave companies and their work emails are closed
- If personal accounts become inactive after prolonged non-use
- Following customer churn where accounts deactivate
If you aren’t regularly removing closed accounts and outdated contacts from lists, your emails won’t find their destinations.
Inactive accounts are a primary source of hard bounces. Be sure to re-confirm or clean your list periodically to avoid sending to black holes.
Domain and Server Issues
Bounces can also stem from technical delivery failures between mail servers. Some examples include:
- Non-existent domain – The receiving domain name doesn’t resolve or no longer exists. Emails to
@idontexist.comwill hard bounce. - Invalid DNS records – Missing MX records and A records for domains and mail servers will force bouncebacks.
- Server unavailable – If the recipient server is down for maintenance or offline, messages cannot be received.
- Server blocked – Recipient mail servers will bounce all emails from blocked servers due to spam or reputation issues.
- Server stuffed – When receiving servers reach maximum capacity, incoming messages are temporarily rejected.
Diagnosing server-related bounces may require checking DNS records and contacting providers. But it’s worth the effort to resolve deliverability problems.
Catching Spam Folder and Blacklists
Vigilant spam filters are another common bounceback villain. Messages diverted to spam and blacklists essentially bounce, with slightly different error messaging.
Recipients and providers aim to keep inboxes clean of junk mail. But sometimes legitimate email gets flagged as spam. Typical causes include:
- Spam trigger words – Using “red flag” phrases like “Free”, “Deals”, “Limited Time” etc.
- Suspicious links/attachments – Embedded links and files can appear risky to filters.
- Poor sender reputation – Past spamming or complaints may lead to pre-emptive blocking.
- No authentication – Lack of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC verification also raises spam likelihood.
- Bulk sending – Sending high volumes fast to the same domain looks like spamming.
Optimizing your content, building sender reputation, and enabling email authentication are key to avoiding false spam flags.
Crammed Inboxes Blocking Delivery
Another roadblock can be inboxes too full to accept new messages.
Every email account has storage limits. Inboxes crammed with thousands of untouched emails quickly fill up – causing new incoming messages to bounce back.
Consumers and business users alike are prone to inbox overload. If they ignore and archive emails infrequently, safe capacity limits can be exceeded.
Recipients may simply need a friendly nudge to clear out old messages before resending. This soft bounce is easily remedied.
Oversized Messages Get Rejected
For messages to arrive, they must also fall within size limits.
Most servers restrict individual emails to 25 MB maximum. But certain recipients enforce even lower thresholds of 10-15 MB to conserve bandwidth.
Attachments like images, documents, and media quickly balloon message size. Composing emails exceeding allowable dimensions triggers bounces.
Getting content down to a reasonable size, removing unnecessary attachments, and possibly splitting into multiple emails avoids this scenario.
Low Sender Reputation Impacts Delivery
Your long-term domain and IP reputation can directly cause bouncebacks.
Low sender reputation often arises from:
- Complaints of spam from recipients
- Past delivery failures and bounces
- Lack of proper domain authentication
- Sharing poor reputation infrastructure
Negative factors like these tank your sender score with major ISPs. Once your domain or IP hits spam threshold levels, recipients will auto-reject messages at connection time – inducing bounces.
Carefully protecting reputation and following best practices keeps your sender credibility intact.
Hard Bounce Causes
Detecting the difference between hard and soft bounces is useful when diagnosing the reason. Let’s examine common causes exclusive to hard bounces:
Invalid Email Address Format
If an email lacks basic structure like a user and domain separated by an “@” symbol, sending servers cannot find the matching recipient account.
Misconfigurations like johnsmith.gmail, @john, or john@ are dead giveaways of formatting issues causing hard bounces.
Non-Existent Account or Domain
When the specified user or domain cannot be found within the recipient’s email system, a hard fail permanent bounce occurs.
Mistakes like [email protected] or [email protected] essentially send messages into empty black holes.
Email Address Specifically Blacklisted
Recipients can blacklist certain suspicious senders at the account level. This directly blocks any emails from arriving for those addresses.
If you’ve ended up on a user’s personal blacklist, attempts to contact will be automatically bounced.
Soft Bounce Causes
In contrast, soft bounces arise from temporary technical or logical impediments:
Full Inbox
Once a recipient inbox hits maximum storage capacity, new incoming messages are temporarily rejected.
The address itself works fine, but the overstuffed mailbox needs manual cleaning before space opens up.
Server Downtime
When the mail server for a domain falls offline due to technical issues, uptime monitoring fails, or maintenance downtime, no emails can be received by accounts under that domain.
But once the server comes back up, messages will flow normally again.
Overzealous Spam Filters
Sometimes legitimate emails get incorrectly flagged as spam by aggressive filters. They aren’t rejected outright but do get temporarily rerouted or delayed.
Whitelisting senders and contacting filter providers can override these faulty spam detections over time.
Oversized Messages
As mentioned earlier, huge emails surpassing size limits also cause soft bounces.
Although rejected initially, resizing content and resending often allows passage.
Hopefully exploring this diverse range of bounceback causes provides some “a-ha” moments! Now that you know why emails bounce, let’s shift gears to prevention and solutions.
How to Check Your Bounce Rate
When sending emails, bouncebacks are an unavoidable nuisance. But how can you quantify the scope of the problem?
Measuring your email bounce rate provides that insightful deliverability benchmark. Let’s explore how bounce rates are calculated, acceptable thresholds, and tools to monitor this key metric.
Calculating Your Bounce Rate Percentage
Your overall bounce rate helps gauge the health and accuracy of your email list. Here is the formula to determine bounce rate:
(Bounced Emails ÷ Total Emails Sent) x 100 = Bounce Rate %
For example, if you sent 1,000 emails last month and 50 bounced, your bounce rate would be:
(50 ÷ 1000) x 100 = 5%
Ideally, you’ll want to keep this total rate as low as possible for maximum deliverability.
Bounce rates can be calculated over any time period – daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually etc. The longer timeframe will smooth out any short-term spikes.
You can also break this total rate down into more granular hard and soft bounce rates.
Hard Bounce Rate
Hard bounces indicate permanently failed deliveries to invalid or inactive addresses. To find this rate:
(Hard Bounces ÷ Total Emails Sent) x 100 = Hard Bounce Rate %
For example, if 30 of the 50 total bounces were hard bounces:
(30 ÷ 1000) x 100 = 3% hard bounce rate
This metric should be kept below 2% for ideal list health. Higher hard bounce rates signal poor list quality.
Soft Bounce Rate
Soft bounces are temporary rejections you can recover from. Calculate this rate with:
(Soft Bounces ÷ Total Emails Sent) x 100 = Soft Bounce Rate %
If our example had 20 soft bounces out of 1,000:
(20 ÷ 1000) x 100 = 2% soft bounce rate
You can afford a slightly higher soft bounce rate in the 3-5% range, as those issues tend to be fixable.
Total Bounce Rate Maximum
When combining hard and soft bounces, what bounce rate should you aim for?
Experts recommend keeping your overall rate under 5% for optimal deliverability.
Major ISPs often tolerance up to 10% bounces before throttling senders. But staying under 5% gives you buffer and better sender reputation.
Aim to tweak your list, email design, and sending practices to hit under 5% total bounces long-term.
Tools to Analyze Bounce Rates
Monitoring your email bounce rate often requires help from tools. Here are some options:
- Email Service Provider (ESP) Reports – Most ESPs like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, etc. provide bounce reports and rates in their platforms.
- Gmail Postmaster Tools – Google’s dashboard shows bounce rate data for Senders using Gmail.
- mailboxvalidator – This validation tool reports bounce rates after testing email list accuracy.
- Bounceless – Specialized software focused just on predictive bounce processing and analysis.
- Return Path – A deliverability platform that tracks and benchmarks bounce rates amongst other metrics.
- MXtoolbox – Provides a free bounce rate calculator tool allowing manual input.
Third-party monitoring is especially useful for larger lists and campaigns. But check your ESP first for the most direct bounce insights.
Crunching the numbers on bounce rate gives you an indispensable deliverability metric and list diagnostics. Use this analysis to shape strategies that ultimately get more emails to the inbox.
Consequences of High Bounce Rates
We’ve explored causes and calculations of bounce rates. Now let’s discuss the implications of unchecked high rates.
Excessive bouncebacks severely hurt your sender reputation, deliverability, efficiency, and customer trust. Understanding these detrimental effects creates urgency to fix the root issues.
Damaged Sender Reputation
Your domain and IP reputation directly influences email deliverability. And high bounce rates tank your sender reputation.
Major ISPs like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo use algorithms factoring in complaint rates, spam reports, and bounce rates to determine domain/IP credibility.
Consistent bounces signal to providers that your list is low-quality and future emails are risky to deliver. As your reputation drops, inbox placement plummets.
According to SparkPost, Gmail typically blocks senders exceeding:
- 4% Hard Bounce Rate
- 10% Soft Bounce Rate
Reputation repair takes time. So avoiding damage in the first place through bounce prevention is key.
Sender Score Impacts
Third-party sender scoring systems like SenderScore also incorporate high bounce rates into low credibility scores.
These scores allow inbox providers to instantly gauge sender reputation. Low scores lead to pre-emptive blocking and quarantining by major ISPs.
Cleaning your list and optimizing campaigns protects sender score by limiting bouncebacks.
Blocklisting by ISPs
Damaged reputation leads to another dire consequence – outright blocklisting at the IP and domain level.
Various ISPs maintain blocklists of senders exceeding bounce and complaint thresholds.
Once added to blocklists, your emails will be automatically rejected or diverted to spam folders by those providers.
Getting removed from blocklists requires appeals and strict sender policy changes. This lengthy process further hurts deliverability in the interim.
Reduced Email Deliverability
The cumulative impacts of lower sender scores and blocklisting are steep drops in your overall email deliverability.
Key metrics like open rates, click rates, and conversions all plummet as emails fail to reach inboxes.
Your email content, offers, and campaigns are useless if the intended recipients never see the messages.
Battling against strained sender reputation is an uphill deliverability fight. Avoiding excessive bounces in the first place is the sustainable path.
Wasted Time and Resources
High bounce rates also waste your valuable time and resources chasing dead ends.
Trying to email inactive addresses burns effort composing messages and following up futilely.
You also end up allocating extra costs and resources towards larger sending volumes and campaign overhead to compensate for the false contacts.
Frustratingly, this wasted time also distracts you from engaging truly interested subscribers – directly hurting customer satisfaction and company growth.
Future Deliverability Issues
Moreover, the deliverability damage from high bounce rates isn’t limited to current sending. It can haunt future communications as well.
Like a bad credit score, strained reputation persists on your domain and IP for 6-12 months after improving practices.
During this probation period, inbox providers remain suspicious of your senders – leading to continued deliverability struggles.
Old bounces also get linked to any new email accounts you create under the same domain or shared IP. This inheritable reputation lag will undermine new sender accounts.
Clearly, excessive bounces create deliverability technical debt that impacts you well into the future.
Extra Time Spent on Outreach
Finally, high bounce rates force you into an inefficient loop of perpetual outreach.
With sizeable portions of your list invalid, initial email sequencing and follow-ups generate frequent bounces.
This means you must re-send and re-follow-up repeatedly to reach all valid members, which multiplied effort spent.
Time is further wasted researching and replacing bounced contacts or troubleshooting deliverability issues.
What originally seemed like a well-planned, one-time sequence turns into a never-ending game of outreach Whac-a-Mole.
The downstream costs and friction of high bounces far outweigh the minimal efforts required to maintain list hygiene and optimize sending practices from the start. A stitch in time saves nine when it comes to bouncebacks.
How to Prevent and Fix Bouncebacks
Now that we’ve diagnosed the bounceback problem, what’s the cure?
Implementing targeted bounce prevention and reduction tactics can get your deliverability back on track. Let’s explore actionable steps you can take through list management, sending optimizations, reputation building, and error analysis.
Email List Maintenance
Your list is the foundation for all outbound email success. So keeping it pristine is priority one for bounce mitigation.
Here are key maintenance practices:
Remove Invalid Addresses
Regularly purge any addresses generating hard bounces. These are definitively inactive accounts.
Segment out one-time soft bounces to periodically retry. But continually bouncing addresses must get axed.
Ideally, scrub your list weekly or monthly for dead wood. Automations help scale this cleanup.
Validate and Confirm New Contacts
When adding fresh contacts, always confirm their address is legit first.
A simple “Please confirm opt-in” double opt-in avoids unverified addresses polluting your data.
For purchased lists, run small test sends to sample and validate quality before full deployment.
Update Inactive Subscriber Accounts
If engaged subscribers inform you of email or domain changes, log these updates. This keeps your database current.
Watch for “[email changed]” auto-replies when reaching out. Use these notifications to update contact details.
Proactively surveying subscribers annually provides an opportunity to fix outdated records before they bounce.
List hygiene vigilance pays off. But for existing dirty lists, reset cleans are needed.
Perform an Email List Reset
If your list has not been properly maintained, a full reset is in order to scrub invalid contacts:
- Export and segment your list by non-bouncing high-engagement subscribers.
- Back up this segment as your new master contacts.
- Delete all remaining records.
- Upload the cleaned master segment to rebuild list.
- Verify any old contacts against new opt-in requirements before adding back.
Resetting untamed lists avoids sending reputation damage until you regain control.
Fixing Invalid Addresses
Even with diligent maintenance, some bad addresses will slip through. Monitoring tools help detect bounces, but how do you confirm and fix the inaccuracies?
Check for Simple Typos
If an address generates only an occasional soft bounce, visually scan for any clear typos in the user or domain spelling.
Compare any subtle differences against proper email structure. A recipient like “jonhson.frank@company” may just need a quick fix.
Verify Email Validity
For addresses without obvious issues, use free validator tools to diagnose.
By testing format, DNS records, and mail server connectivity, these tools flag nonexistent domains or users.
Some paid validators like ZeroBounce even scrub against real mailboxes to safely verify email existence.
Research Updated Business Contacts
For old or outdated business emails, research if the company still exists and any new email formats.
Many companies migrate to a standard “[email protected]” convention to help guess updated addresses.
Corporate websites often list individual employee contacts and roles to generate likely replacement addresses.
Remove Irrecoverable Addresses
However, if all checks and troubleshooting fail to uncover a working email, delete it.
You gave it your best investigative shot – an unverified address must get removed to stop recurring bounces.
Authentication Techniques
Proper email authentication tells receiving servers “Hey, I’m legit!” which boosts deliverability and avoids spam mis-classifications.
Here are key methods to enable:
SPF Records
An SPF record verifies your authorized sending IP addresses.
In your DNS records, add an SPF TXT entry with all IPs used to send email:
v=spf1 ip4:192.168.1.1 ip4:192.168.1.2 ~allCommon issues like duplicate SPF records must get corrected for authentication strength.
DKIM Signature
DKIM digitally signs your outgoing messages to validate they have not been modified in transit.
Typically enabled through your email provider or software, DKIM adds encrypted authentication headers.
Use 2048-bit keys and keep your DKIM selector consistent across sending domains.
DMARC Policy
A DMARC record sets your authorization enforcement policy, aligning SPF/DKIM under your domain.
Start with a monitoring-only p=none DMARC record, then progressively tighten to p=quarantine or p=reject policies.
Follow guidelines from the DMARC Analyzer Tool for optimal configuration.
Enabling some or all of these protocols curbs bounces by verifying your legitimate right to send emails.
Sending Frequency Adjustments
Finding the optimal email sending cadence balances engagement with deliverability.
Here are frequency best practices:
- Limit sends to the same domain to 3-4 emails daily maximum, to avoid throttling.
- Maintain a 60-90 second delay between consecutive messages to not appear spammy.
- Set weekly volume limits per account based on published inbox provider quotas (i.e. Gmail daily limits).
- Gradually ramp up new IP addresses by steadily increasing volumes week-over-week.
Adjusting your sending patterns boosts reputation and reduces pending bounces.
Reputation Monitoring
Staying on top of your sender reputation helps you catch issues proactively before deliverability suffers too much.
Monitoring tools like SenderScore and Exploratodo offer free reputation snapshots. Sign up to check weekly/monthly.
For more robust monitoring, ReturnPath’s Validity Score provide detailed reputation tracking and inbox placement data.
Keep a pulse on your standing to shape your sending practices and avoid future bounces.
Analyzing Bounceback Messages
Finally, diagnosing bounceback messages themselves provides actionable details for your improvements.
Here are tips for analyzing bounces:
Identify the Bounce Type
First categorize bounces as hard vs. soft. Hard bounces require permanent removal of the address. Soft bounces call for temporary throttling and retesting.
Note Any Error Codes
Error codes like “550 5.2.1” have specific technical meanings that reveal issues like authentication failures or inactive accounts.
Research codes against SMTP error code glossaries to interpret.
Check Bounce Details
Read the descriptive details closely. Phrases like “unrecognized user” or “server unavailable” explain the root cause. Details guide your fixes.
Review Full Headers
Hard bounce headers expose the original message’s full journey and identify failures points by domain/server.
Post headers into a header analyzer to parse these records.
Understanding each bounce guides targeted actions to incrementally improve deliverability for that specific failure scenario.
With vigilance across these important facets of email success – list quality, sending practices, reputation, and diagnostics – you gain control over the chaotic world of bouncebacks. Master the skills and deliverability will improve dramatically.
Best Practices to Avoid Bouncebacks
Now that we’ve explored bounce causes and fixes, let’s shift to proactive prevention strategies.
Adopting these bounce-reducing best practices will help you reach inboxes consistently going forward.
Double Opt-in Email Subscription
The best defense against bogus addresses is double opt-in subscription.
With double opt-in, new contacts must take two actions to join your list:
- Initially sign up by submitting their email address.
- Respond and confirm to a verification email sent to the address provided.
This confirmation step ensures a valid, responsive mailbox.
Compare single opt-in vs double opt-in:
| Single Opt-In | Double Opt-In |
| User submits email | User submits email |
| Email added directly | Opt-in verification email sent to address |
| Higher risk of fake/misspelled emails | User must click confirmation link to subscribe |
| Higher bounce rates | Only confirmed opt-ins are added |
| Lower list quality | Higher list quality and lower bounces |
While double opt-in will shrink your list size, the contacts gained are genuine. This quality over quantity trade-off pays dividends in engagements and bounces avoided.
Opt-in Confirmation Tips
Here are ways to optimize the opt-in process:
- Send confirmation emails immediately upon signup submission to capitalize on interest.
- Make the verification CTA prominent and actionable, like “Yes, subscribe me!”
- Set the confirmation link to expire after a short period to capture engaged users.
- Offer a lead magnet, discount, or exclusive content to incentivize confirmation.
- Thank users upon double opt-in with a warm personalized welcome message.
Double opt-in creates an invaluable quality buffer against bad addresses polluting your ecosystem.
Send Consistently, Don’t Batch
Maintaining consistent send intervals boosts your sender reputation by looking naturally conversational. But avoid batch sends.
Schedulers like MailerLite allow you to easily space sends consistently without batches:
✅ Good – 100 emails sent daily over 10 days
❌ Bad – 1000 emails sent on day one, none for 9 days
Consistent flows appear more personal and less spammy.recipient servers. Less idle periods also keep your IP reputation “fresh” with recent healthy usage.
Just don’t exceed recommended daily limits based on your plan.
Smooth, steady sending helps your reputation while preventing future bounces.
Avoid Spam Trigger Words
Specific words are notorious spam magnets. Avoiding them keeps your email out of the spam box.
Here are some classic spam trigger words and phrases to steer clear of:
- FREE
- Special Offer
- Discounts
- Act Now
- Unbelievable Deal
- Satisfaction Guaranteed
- Subscription Cancel Anytime
- Earn Money Fast
Also refrain from excessive ALL CAPS, overused exclamation points, and repeated characters like “Frrreee”.
Keep wording natural to match your brand voice and avoid setting off spam detector tripwires.
Personalize Content
Personalization displays familiarity and resonates more genuinely with recipients. This reduces spam suspicions and bounces.
Ways to infuse personalization include:
- Referencing past purchases, website visits, or interests
- Following up on previous message threads
- Adding the recipient’s name, company, or role
- Segmenting by demographics, location, behavior, etc.
- Recommending specific aligned products/services
- Customizing with merge tags, triggers, etc.
Avoid blasting the same generic bulk message to all. Tailor your prose to the reader.
Monitor Daily Sending Limits
Respect inbox provider sending limitations to avoid throttling or blocking tripping your bounces.
Research and stick below the daily quotas for your major recipients:
- Gmail – 500 emails per day per account
- Outlook – 30,000 emails per day per account
- Yahoo – 500 – 5,000 daily emails per account
- AOL – 10,000 emails per day per account
Consult published sending limits to shape your volume and cadence accordingly.
Gradually ramp up new IPs and accounts through warming techniques as well.
Sending within reasonable limits and warming prevents future rejection bounces.
Additional Bounce Prevention Checklist
Here are a few other tips to minimize bounces:
- Use compliance confirmation – Occasionally survey subscribers to reconfirm opt-in status.
- Verify against purchased lists – Sample test small batches before full send to validate quality.
- Scrub subject lines – Avoid spammy keywords in the subject as well that trigger filters.
- Split big attachments – If needed, divide into multiple smaller emails under allowed limits.
- Monitor complaint feedback loops – Receiver complaints indicate deliverability issues to address.
With vigilance on these fronts, your email program can thrive and grow without the drag of bouncebacks.
Bounceback Diagnosis Tools
Identifying and understanding bouncebacks is crucial for optimization. Thankfully, specialized tools exist to diagnose your email delivery failures.
Let’s explore some top bounceback analysis solutions.
MxToolbox Bounceback Analyzer
MxToolbox offers an invaluable free bounceback analysis tool to parse error messages and isolate causes.
Just copy and paste in the full raw bounceback message headers.
MxToolbox scans the error codes, strings, sender/recipient domains, header hops, and additional diagnostic details.
It then outputs a summary of:
- The core bounce reason
- Severity (hard vs soft)
- Date/time
- Any suspicious content
- Suggested actions to resolve the specific bounce.
With millions of bounceback patterns indexed, MxToolbox provides targeted troubleshooting insights you can act on.
MailTester Email Evaluations
While MxToolbox diagnoses existing bounces, MailTester checks emails before sending to predict deliverability.
When you input a draft email, MailTester scans and provides a scorecard of:
- Spaminess rating
- Invalid addresses
- Spam filter triggering content
- Authentication issues
- Server connectivity checks
This pre-flight validation highlights correctable flaws like missing SPF records that may cause future bounces and flags any sketchy contacts.
Proactively optimizing your emails and lists according to MailTester suggestions improves inbox placement.
Gmail Postmaster Tools
For campaigns sent through Gmail, leverage Google’s free Postmaster Tools for aggregate analytics.
Connecting your sender account provides deliverability metrics like:
- Overall bounce rate
- Hard vs. soft bounce breakdown
- Spam report rate
- Authentication and security issues
Google will also surface domain, IP, and campaign-specific bounce insights so you can pinpoint trouble areas.
Review Postmaster suggestions to curb bounces before your Gmail deliverability suffers.
Header Analyzers
Full email headers contain a trove of bounce diagnostic clues – if you can decode them.
Thankfully, header analyzer tools translate. Simply copy and paste headers into tools like:
And they parse key details like:
- The bounce error
- Encryption protocols used
- Routing path
- Failed hops
- Spam filter detection
- Authentication issues
Header inconsistencies that commonly cause bounces become obvious.
DNS Record Checkers
Improperly configured DNS records also contribute to deliverability failures.
Validate your SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MX records against requirements using DNS checker tools like:
Scan for issues like duplicate records, incorrect setup, or missing entries.
Proper DNS fortifies email infrastructure against future bounces.
Leveraging the right tools expedites identifying bounce causes and implementing fixes quickly. And deliverability gains come even quicker when you know precisely what to improve.
FAQs About Email Bouncebacks
Let’s wrap up our comprehensive bounceback guide by answering some frequently asked questions.
Will an Incorrect Email Address Bounce?
Yes, any email sent to an address with a typo, formatting error, or other mistake will bounce with a hard fail.
Common incorrect address issues that guarantee bounces include:
- Missing @ symbol (johnsmithgmail.com)
- Misspelled domain ([email protected])
- Invalid username (sally.jones@)
- Added spaces (jane@email .com)
- Missing dot separators (jane@emailcom)
Since the flawed address doesn’t actually exist, the receiving server can’t find the matching recipient account. This triggers permanent hard bounce errors.
Always proofread addresses carefully before sending. Bounces hurt your sender reputation.
Do All Invalid Email Addresses Bounce?
Not necessarily. While incorrect formats universally bounce, not every invalid address bounces.
Some obsolete, inactive, or fake addresses slip through without bouncing due to factors like:
- Disposable email domains – Temporary emails at domains like @mailinator.com are technically valid but unmonitored. Emails sent there may disappear into the void without a bounce.
- Server catching – Recipients servers may automatically send delivery confirmations without fully checking if an account exists. These can falsely show “success.”
- Spam trap accounts – ISPs often create dummy “honeypot” accounts to catch spammers. Messages to these traps don’t bounce but instead flag suspicious senders.
- Loopback traffic – Bad email hygiene like lacking authentication allows spammers to spoof your domain and send to any made-up address without bouncing.
So while bounces reliably signal invalid addresses, lack of bounce alone doesn’t guarantee validity. Additional verification is needed.
How Long Does it Take to Get a Bounceback?
Bounceback timing depends on the retry schedule of the sending server and retry limits of the receiving server.
Typically, invalid recipient domains and users cause fast hard bounces:
- Immediate – Permanently bad SMTP connections bounce instantly.
- Minutes – Completely invalid mailboxes bounce after a couple quick server retries.
- Hours – Servers retry deliveries for a few hours before issuing hard bounces.
Soft bounces follow more extended retry timelines:
- 1-3 days – Servers retry temporarily full or unavailable addresses for a few days.
- 1 week – Multi-week retry schedules allow recovery time for soft bounces.
So while some hard bounces happen immediately, give soft bounces 1-2 weeks before removing addresses.
Can Future Email Users Get My Old Bounced Message?
Interesting bounceback scenario – what if someone creates an email address that previously bounced me? Will they somehow get my old bounced message?
The answer is typically no. In most cases, previous bounces to an address won’t resurface later.
When an undeliverable notice bounces, the recipient server simply discards the message. Servers don’t keep history of failed deliveries to non-existent addresses.
So if [email protected] bounces my email today, but Jane joins example.com next month, she won’t see my old bounced message in her new inbox.
The only exception is if an inactive account reactivates. Any soft bounces stored could get retried on reactivation. But brand new accounts don’t inherit old bounces.
What if I Don’t Get Any Bounceback Notification?
If you don’t receive bounce notifications, it usually signals one of two issues:
1. Your message didn’t reach the recipient server.
This points to pre-send blocking. Causes include:
- Spam filter flagging
- Bad sender reputation
- Incorrect SMTP setup
2. Bounces aren’t configured properly.
Bounce forwarding may not be enabled in your email server settings. Check that:
- Forwarding to your address is active.
- Handling isn’t misconfigured to the wrong account.
- Monitoring tools have proper access permissions.
Bounce notifications are crucial for email hygiene and optimization. So address any visibility gaps in your reporting.
Additional Common Bounceback Questions
Let’s explore a few other frequent bounceback questions:
Why do bounces hurt sender reputation?
ISPs see bounces as a signal of overall email hygiene issues. Too many shows your list is likely low-quality with much invalid data. Poor sender practices are assumed.
Does the recipient know I got a bounce?
No, recipients aren’t notified of bounces. Bouncebacks are automatic server messages only visible to the sender.
How do I find the sending IP from a bounceback?
The server IP will be listed in the bounce headers. Post the full header into an analyzer tool to parse.
Why do some invalid addresses pass spam traps?
Basic spam traps only temporarily accept messages and don’t validate against actual user accounts. So invalid emails may get through before being detected as spam.
How do I analyze bounces in Gmail?
Enable Gmail Postmaster Tools for bounce summaries, then check the headers of your returned bounceback messages.
What is the difference between a soft bounce and hard bounce?
A hard bounce is a permanent delivery failure, typically due to an invalid or inactive email address. A soft bounce is temporary due to a full inbox, unavailable server, etc. and may still deliver later.
What bounce rate is considered high?
Aim to keep hard bounces under 2% of emails sent, soft bounces under 5%, and total bounces under 5%. Anything higher signals potential issues.
How do I reduce my bounce rate?
Prune hard bounces, confirm opt-ins, enable authentication, carefully source lists, segment content, and optimize your sender reputation to lower bounce rates.
Why did my email suddenly start bouncing?
New bounces may indicate a domain or IP reputation problem, a blocklisting by a major ISP, or crossing a sending threshold flagging spam detection. Check your reputation and sending volumes.
How can I tell if an email address is valid before sending?
Use an email address validator like ZeroBounce or NeverBounce to validate the existence of email accounts before sending.
How do I analyze a bounceback message?
Check for error codes, read the descriptive details carefully, and paste the full headers into a parser tool to identify the root cause.
How long does it take to get an email bounceback?
Instant hard bounces happen immediately but soft bounces may take 1-3 days. Give emails 1-2 weeks before removing soft-bounced addresses.
Will a fake or incorrect email address always bounce?
Yes, any improperly formatted email address will hard bounce. But some invalid addresses may not bounce if using disposable domains or spam trap accounts.
How do I stop getting email bouncebacks?
Double opt-in subscriptions, allowlist your domain, enable sender authentication, maintain your list hygiene, follow inbox provider sending limits, and monitor your sender reputation.
Key Takeaways – Managing Email Bouncebacks
Email bouncebacks are a nuisance but unavoidable facet of deliverability. However, armed with the right knowledge, you can minimize their impact.
Here are the key lessons to master:
- Monitor your bounce rate – Calculate your overall hard vs. soft bounce rate regularly to gauge list health. Aim for less than 2% hard bounces and under 5% total bounces.
- Clean your list vigilantly – Prune hard bounces, validate new contacts, and periodically audit for inactive emails to keep quality pristine.
- Enable authentication – Use SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to verify your legitimacy as a sender and avoid false spam flags.
- Send thoughtfully – Respect inbox provider limits, throttle volume, personalize content, and match recipient domains/roles to increase relevancy.
- Check reputation routinely – Keep tabs on your domain/IP reputation and quickly address any metrics suggesting future blocks or throttling.
- Analyze bounces individually – Diagnose the specific root causes in bounced messages through header analysis and troubleshooting tools.
- Adopt best practices proactively – Default to bounce-minimizing techniques like double opt-in, allowlisting, warmups, compliance checks, and careful list sourcing.
Avoiding bounces boils down to vigilance across your email list quality, sending habits, sender reputation, and content relevance. Mastering these areas keeps your emails aimed at the inbox.
With a sharp game plan to manage bouncebacks, you gain back precious time to focus on engaging subscribers – not chasing email mysteries.