Understanding Email Bounce behavior and functions (soft bounce and hard bounce)
Author: toyoda2k // Category: Tecnologia, referenceThis post is regarding a project that I am heading at the Office. I am dealing with emails and it’s behavior, and I came up with their bounce information and how it is treated by the email servers, and if they are a standardized for every server, or not. The fact is that even being out there for a long time, emails, are still, not a standardized communication tool, and varies from server to server.
If you first imagined that they were standardized, then you are mostly wrong. I can’t say that it is a fruit salad, but they have so many variations that they can’t just be defined by some simple rules.
Emails are used nowadays as a permanent and necessary tool mostly for communication, dissemination of information, and documentation. If you are a user that send emails but need to understand a little more about the issues regarding it’s deliverability, then you should understand what is Email bounce and it’s variations or if you are sending newsletter and needs to understand a little more on how bounces works and what to do with them, then reading this post will help, but please, it’s not the only truth, it’s just a simple small undestanding about this huge tool called email.
For start, there are two types of known emails bounces:
- Soft Bounces
- Hard Bounces
Soft Bounces are known as for their Temporary condition, such as “Mailbox full”.
Hard bounces are known as for their permanent condition, such as “User unknown”.
Bottom line is that it’s far from an exact science. There are lots of variants and new definitions that means nothing or means the same thing, nut in other words (literally).
Some Mail servers uses techniques to avoid or discourage spammers, or email that they believe that is from a spammer (by deduction). in this case they just reply as an User unknown response, but in most cases the user is known.Another situation is like the Mail servers responses is like: “Uder undefined” and other Mail servers responses are: “User not recognized”. It actually means the same thing, but the system has to be prepared to understand this information, if not, this is going to be just another unknown bounce, which primarily is classified as a Soft Bounce.
To eliminate emails classified as soft bounce from the database, it is better to have a repetition cause, like, sending emails for this specific user, more than once, and in email mkt campanign cases, more than one campaign. If in all of the cases, it bounces as a Soft Bounce, then, it’s better to remove it from the database.
For just an email purpose, try to understand the reason why it bounced and then it is going to be easier for you to make it through. but a few things may be checked at first, like double check the email spelling and if it is a valid email. If everything is ok, then check the bounce information. If nothing seems to be reasonable, then you shoud go to Google.
For an Email marketing campaign, you should check for a few information, is this a sanitized database? if not, you will probably get a lot of hard bounces, don’t feel scary, just sanitize it, in case your mail sender tool does not do it for you automatically, then, make sure you have a email to receive bounces, you certainly will have them, and check whick one are consider soft bounces, to resend it until it goes through.
Remember, it’s not a bible, it’s a professional, with years of road doing that saying what maybe one of the best solutions when dealing with email bounces.
If you didn’t understand a word, please leave a comment.
cheers,
Toyoda