What are Hard & Soft Bounces?

What are Bounces? 

Email Bounces are when an email cant be delivered for one reason or another. A bit like if you were to throw at a closed door it wouldn't go through it would bounce back. 

Primarily, there are 2 different bounces that effect the BriefYourMarket contact in different ways:

• A Soft Bounce 
• A Hard Bounce 

Whats the difference?

In a nutshell a Hard Bounce is a permanent bounce, meaning BriefYourMarket will not try to send to that contact again, therefore BriefYourMa A Soft Bounce is a temporary send failure on the recipients mail server, such as a full mailbox. 

When can a Soft Bounce occur?

For example, if you are sending an email to Joe@example.com and their mailbox is full, their mail server (the server that handles their mail delivery) will keep that email until they clear some space. So the email has left the BriefYourMarket mail-server successfully but the recipient has not received the email yet.

When can a Hard Bounce occur? 

A  Hard Bounce can occur for many different reasons. This is a permanent failure and the error could be because of one of the following categories: 

• bad-domain - This issue occurs when the domain (example.com) is invalid or just does not exist
  
  Example: The company that you are emailing to have changed their domain or the domain has expired.
• bad-mailbox - This error occurs when the email address (joe@example.com) is bad, invalid or just does not exist
  
  Example: The recipient that you are sending to at a certain company does not work there anymore and has had their mailbox removed.
  
  
• inative-mailbox - Similar to bad-mailbox this issue occurs when the recipient has an expired, inactive or disabled email address
  
  Example: The recipient could have their Mailbox temporary disabled as they might be on  a long term holiday 

How can I stop my emails from bouncing? 

Unfortunately there is no way to prevent your mail from being bounced as neither you nor BriefYourMarket are in control of the recipients mail-server. The only way you can help prevent this is to ensure your data is up-to-date. 

Still need more help?

If you still require more assistance, please contact our support team by raising a ticket, emailing support@briefyourmarket.co.uk or calling 0344 800 8424 where our team will be happy to help you.