How do I tell the difference between soft and hard bounces?
Bounce Types
The type of bounce is recorded for reporting purposes. Both email and SMS bounce reporting record two types of bounces: Hard and soft.
| Bounce Types | Details |
|---|---|
| Hard | The reason for non-delivery is due to a permanent error that signals the contact or email domain is unknown or doesn’t exist. A hard bounce can also mean a spam block. When you first send to your mailing list immediate bounces, such as a non-existent email address, are recorded and the contact is immediately set to ‘Bounced’, as there’s no point trying to send to these contacts. |
| Soft | A temporary error that signals a full mailbox, temporarily unavailable domain or receiving server issues. |
| Policy related | Generally related to company policy where staff are not allowed to receive messages with certain wording, images or attachments. The receiving server is likely to block this type of mail. |
Bounce Reports
The Email Recipients Report includes a Bounced tab which lists bounces and auto-responders.
If you’d like to dig deeper and see which were soft bounces, click the Export button below the graph. The exported list contains details about the bounce type and reason.