Soft vs. Hard Bounce Emails, What's the Difference?

What is an Email Bounce?

When an email is rejected by an email server, this results in a Bounced Email.  The recipient will have no opportunity to open and view the content you are providing.  There are many reasons that can point to why this email bounce occurs.  Monitoring the number of bounced emails in your Fugent campaigns ensures that your messaging is reaching your subscribed contacts.  If you notice a number of bounced emails in your Fugent email reports after sending a campaign, not all hope is lost with these contacts.  In this article we’ll look at the main differences between a hard & soft bounced email and what potential steps can be taken after segmenting these email contacts. 

What is a Soft Bounce?

With a soft bounce, there is much less severity.  There is more uncertainty around a soft bounce but indicates a temporary delivery issue.   These are some common reasons this could happen.

• Recipient email server is down or offline.
• Receiving mailbox is full (over quota).
• Email message is too large.

Email addresses that result in a soft bounce should be sent another copy of the email in the next 5-7 business days in order to successfully receive the email content.  

What is a Hard Bounce?

With a hard bounce, this indicates a permanent reason why an email address cannot receive a message.  Once an email is displayed as a hard bounce, these email addresses are blacklisted within Fugent and are excluded from all future campaigns in order to keep your contact lists scrubbed.  It is recommended that you clean all hard bounced emails from your database to prevent future contact to an undeliverable email address.

Common reasons for a hard bounce email include:

• Email address was entered incorrectly.
• Recipient email address doesn't exist, moved companies.
• Domain name doesn't exist.
• Recipient email server has completely blocked delivery