Why do my emails bounce?

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Main reasons of bouncing

"Bouncing" means that your sent email has bounced back from the recipient's server with an error. Bounces could have various reasons, but there are three main categories.

Soft bounce: this is a temporary error usually. The email has reached the recipient's server, but bounced before it could land in the recipient's email account. The soft bounce reason could be that the recipient's email account is full, server is temporarily unavailable or the size of the message is too large, etc.

Hard bounce: this is a permanent error usually. The most common reason is that the recipient's email address doesn't exists on the server or the server itself cannot be identified (for example when the user mistyped the domain of the email).

SPAM: the recipient's server recognized our email as spam for some reason. Many times the spam filter of the recipient's server is too sensitive and gives a false positive. Main ESPs (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail) inspect the engagement of the recipient to the sender - does he/she open the emails of the sender, does he/she click on a link in the email etc. It's also possible that the recipient marks the message as spam manually. In case of main ESPs SalesAutopilot can recognize this event (through Feedback Loops) and you can see them separately in the bounce stats. You can minimize being marked as spam by sending emails only to opt-in lists, relevant content and always place the "unsubscribe" link in a well recognizable spot in the email.

SalesAutopilot automatically detects the reason of bouncing and categorizes it according to the main categories above. Depending on the bounce handling settings SalesAutopilot may change the subscriber's status. In case of a hard bounce SalesAutopilot always sets the status to inactive.

How can I decrease the number of bounced emails?

We strongly recommend you to use a double opt-in process even in the cases of eCommerce orders. In the double opt-in process the subscriber has to confirm the signup by clicking a special confirm link in an email. Until it doesn't happen SalesAutopilot won't send any emails to the subscriber. The subscriber can confirm the signup if he/she has given a real email address to which he/she has access. We also recommend to encourage subscribers to add you as a "trusted sender" in the email client they're using. Test your emails with major ESPs before you send them to the whole list.