Understanding bounced emails

Overview

When viewing your reporting data for campaigns or automations, at some point, you'll see a percentage of bounced emails, which means that a contact's email provider's server rejected the email sent by Sendlane on your behalf.

Read on to learn more about bounced emails.

Hard versus soft bounces

A hard bounce means that the email cannot be delivered for a permanent reason, such as: 

• the email address is fake or invalid (misspellings happen more often than you'd think!)

• the domain does not exist

• the contact is not accepting emails

• the account has been closed 

Contacts within your account that have registered as a hard bounce will immediately be added to your suppression list so they cannot be sent another email.

A soft bounce means that the email cannot be delivered for a temporary reason, such as:

• the contact's inbox is full

• the email is too large

• the contact's email server is overloaded, experiencing delays or is offline 

We will continue trying to deliver to a soft-bounced contact a few times before it is considered a hard-bounce and added to suppression. 

Bounce data

To view the number of bounced emails per email message, locate your campaign or automation reporting data.

Scroll to the Domain Breakdown section to see the number of bounced emails, by domain.

The reason for the bounce is not available in reporting data.