Soft vs. Hard Bounce and How to Fix Them

Yes, absolutely. Hard bounces indicate permanent delivery failures, so continuing to send to these addresses will only hurt your sender reputation. Most email platforms automatically suppress hard-bounced addresses, but you should manually remove them from your active lists to keep your data clean and your metrics accurate.

While you can't prevent all soft bounces (they're often due to temporary issues on the recipient's end), you can reduce them by keeping your email file sizes reasonable, spreading out your sends to avoid overwhelming servers, and maintaining good sender practices. Also, regularly cleaning your list helps identify addresses that consistently soft bounce and might need removal.

A common soft bounce scenario is when someone's Gmail inbox is full. Your email reaches Gmail's servers, but because the recipient hasn't cleared out their storage, Gmail can't deliver it to their inbox. Gmail will typically retry delivery for several days, and if the recipient clears space, your email might still get delivered. Another example is when a company's email server is temporarily down for maintenance – your email will bounce back but might go through once the server is back online.

Hard bounces usually happen for one of these reasons: invalid email addresses (typos or non-existent accounts), dead domains, or your sender reputation being blocked by recipient servers. Start by checking the bounce error messages for clues like "user unknown" or "blocked." Verify that email addresses are spelt correctly and exist. If many emails are bouncing at once, check if your domain is blacklisted or if you need to set up proper email authentication (SPF, DKIM). The key is reading the bounce codes carefully – they'll tell you exactly what went wrong.