Bounced Emails – Hard Bounce vs. Soft Bounce

A bounce in email marketing terms is an automated message from an email system, informing Encharge that the message has not been delivered. When this happens, Encharge will receive automatic notification of the delivery failure with the time of the bounce and the reason for the bounce.

There are two types of bounces: hard bounce and soft bounce.

Soft Bounce vs. Hard Bounce

Think of soft bounces as blocks that are a short-term issue – you don’t need to permanently unsubscribe these email addresses. However, hard bounces are either invalid or non-existent addresses that are unsubscribed immediately.

Encharge shows hard bounces as "Bounced". We show soft bounces separately as "Soft bounced".

Soft bounce

A soft bounce means that the email address was valid and the email message reached the recipient’s mail server. However, common reasons for a soft bounced back include:

• The mailbox was full (the user is over their quota)
• The server was down
• The message was too large for the recipient’s inbox
• Low-quality / spammy email.

With certain transient errors, we continue to attempt to send the emails for up to 72 hours until the email is delivered. If an email is not delivered within 72 hours, it turns into a soft bounce. However, we won't unsubscribe people for soft bounces.

Hard bounce (shows as "Bounced" in Encharge)

A  hard bounce occurs when the message has been permanently rejected either because:

• The email address is invalid
• The email address doesn’t exist
• The email domain doesn't exist

Continuing to try to send to a known bad address will harm your reputation with the receiver, so we prevent that.  We automatically unsubscribe hard-bounced email addresses. The reason for unsubscribing will be "Email bounced" along with the technical reason for the bounce like this:

See all bounced contacts

To see all people that have bounced you can create a segment using the Field condition like this: