Hard Bounces vs. Soft Bounces

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What is a Bounce?

When a recipient server blocks an incoming email, it’s called a bounce. When a bounce happens, the receiving server usually provides a message stating the reason for the bounce, allowing Privy to categorize them as soft or hard bounces.

In this article, you’ll learn about some specific reasons why bounces can happen and their effect on your contact list.

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Hard Bounces

Hard bounces indicate that the email address cannot receive emails permanently. Some of the reasons for a hard bounce might be:

• The email address is invalid or nonexistent

• The recipient server is no longer active or has blocked emails permanently

• The recipient user had a firewall or a strict spam filter

Once an email hard bounces, the recipient address will be automatically and immediately marked as “suppressed: non-mailable,” permanently removing the contact from your mailable contacts list.

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Soft Bounces

Soft bounces indicate a temporary issue that is preventing that address from receiving emails at that time. Servers will continue to attempt to deliver the email until a certain amount of time has passed without success before officially sending back a bounce message. Some of the reasons for a soft bounce might be: 

Soft bounces will not cause the email address to be marked as non-mailable, but can be persistent depending on the cause.

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How to monitor your bounce rate

Now that you have an idea of what the difference between hard and soft bounces is, you can better analyze your bounce rates and access the detailed error messages for more information about them.

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Campaign Reporting

To find your bounce rate + identify bounced email addresses for a specific campaign:

• Head to your Campaigns page and click on the desired Sent email.

• Scroll down to your Delivery Report to find your overall bounce rate. Hover over the graph to identify the number of unique bounces.

• Scroll down to your Activity table and filter by Bounces in the dropdown menu.

Here you’ll be able to check individual contacts who have returned bounce messages, and by clicking on their email address, you’ll see the separate bounce error messages with more details:

This allows you to correct any possible causes of bounces and gain insights on bounce issues that cannot be immediately resolved. 

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What is a good bounce rate?

A good bounce rate will be 2% or lower. Anything between 2% and 5% is worth investigating, and anything over 5% is considered critical and requires immediate action for improvement.

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How can I improve my bounce rate?

Major points to take into account when it comes to a high rate of bounces are: 

• What are the major causes of bounces? You can assess this by looking at the bounce reasons messages when identifying email addresses that are bouncing from Campaigns.

• Are my domain settings within Privy correctly configured? You can assess this by checking your account’s domain settings page. 

One other very important thing to note is that since February 2024, Google and Yahoo have set specific requirements for email senders, including setting up authentication methods such as DMARC, SPF, and DKIM records to send emails to their users’ inboxes. These requirements can have a great impact on your deliverability and bounce rate, so make sure to keep an eye on that. 

We have an article that goes into more detail about email authentication, but you can also reach out to us for extra help by sending an email to support@privy.com.