Whether you’ve been in the email marketing game for a while, or you’re just getting started, you’ve probably encountered an email address on your list bouncing. When an email can’t be delivered to the recipient, it’s called a bounce. Email addresses bounce for a number of reasons, and we’re here to help you understand why this happens and what to do when it does happen.
Email Bounce Limits
Once an email address reaches its limit of hard or soft bounces, Drip will no longer attempt to send emails to that person. There are two types of bounced emails: hard and soft.
Hard Bounces: 1
A hard bounce is defined as an email that has been returned to the sender due to the intended recipient’s email address being invalid or non-existent. Hard bounces occur due to a non-existent domain, or a misspelled email address.
It’s likely that an email address that hard bounces is no longer valid, so after 1 email hard bounces for an email address, we will no longer attempt to send emails to that person. If a hard bounce is recorded for a particular email address, that person will automatically get flagged as undeliverable.
Soft Bounces: 4
In some cases, when a more temporary error is detected, an email will sit as "pending" for up to 72 hours as it's being retried. However, if we get an explicit error back at any point then that is a definitive failure and we won't keep retrying. A definitive soft bounce can happen during the initial send and the email will show a "Soft Bounced" status in the subscriber's profile.
A soft bounce is defined as an email that has reached the recipient’s mail server but is sent back before it reaches the intended inbox. Soft bounces commonly occur when the intended recipient’s inbox is full, the server was down, or the message was too large for the recipient’s inbox.
Soft bounces are typically temporary and a Campaign will remain in "Pending" as we attempt to send the email again for up to 72 hours after the soft bounce to see if the issue is resolved:
After 4 separate emails soft bounce for a particular email address, the email will have a status of "Soft Bounced" and that person will automatically get flagged as undeliverable:
High Bounce Rates
Drip monitors hard and soft bounce rates to ensure that we are able to maintain a high sending reputation for all of our customers. As part of this effort, if your account reaches too high of a bounce rate, your email sending will be blocked immediately. You will receive an alert that your sending is blocked via email and you will see an alert inside of your Drip account.
If you have any concerns about whether or not your intended recipient list might put your account over the bounce threshold, reach out to our support team before sending.
To prevent your sending from being blocked due to a high bounce rate, we recommend running your list through a platform like Neverbounce or Kickbox before importing it to Drip.
Hard Bounce Report
Go to Analytics > Events > Bounces to view a hard bounce report. Select the date range you’d like to view and the report will run. Because soft bounces are typically temporary, and we attempt to continue sending emails for up to 72 hours we do not currently report on soft bounces.
Deactivate Undeliverable People
Filter your list to only show people who have undeliverable email addresses by going to People > Active > people who are undeliverable. By default, undeliverable people are marked as Active. You may want to keep undeliverable people Active so Drip will continue to collect data on them, and you can reach them through Facebook Custom Audiences or other third-party messaging integrations.
If you don’t need to continue to collect data or reach out to them through third-party integrations, automatically deactivate undeliverable people with this shareable workflow.
If anyone has been marked as undeliverable and it was an error, please reach out to our support team for assistance.