What is a soft bounce in email marketing?

A soft bounce is a temporary email delivery failure. The message reached the recipient’s mail server but couldn’t be delivered due to a short-term issue such as a full inbox, server downtime, or rate limiting.

What is a hard bounce email?

A hard bounce is a permanent delivery failure. It usually means the email address does not exist, the domain is invalid, or the receiving server has permanently rejected the message.

What is the difference between soft bounce and hard bounce?

Soft bounces are temporary and retryable, while hard bounces are permanent and require removing or suppressing the address from your sending list.

Are soft bounces bad for deliverability?

Occasional soft bounces are normal, but repeated soft bounces can negatively affect deliverability over time by signaling poor list quality or problematic sending behavior.

Should I remove soft bounces from my email list?

Not after a single occurrence. Remove or suppress addresses only if soft bounces repeat across multiple sends, indicating a persistent issue.

Should I immediately remove hard bounces?

Yes. Hard bounces should be removed or suppressed immediately. Continuing to send to hard-bouncing addresses harms sender reputation and increases the risk of filtering or blocking.

What causes soft bounce emails most often?

Common causes include full inboxes, temporary server outages, message size limits, greylisting, rate limits, network timeouts, and short-term DNS or routing issues.

What causes hard bounce emails?

Hard bounces are typically caused by invalid or mistyped email addresses, non-existent domains, deleted mailboxes, or permanent server-level rejections.

How do I fix a soft bounce email?

Check the bounce reason first. Reduce message size, slow down sending if rate-limited, verify authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), retry delivery, and suppress the address if the bounce persists across campaigns.

Can soft bounces turn into hard bounces?

Yes. Repeated soft bounces can indicate an address is effectively unreachable and should be treated as a permanent failure after a consistent pattern of unsuccessful retries.

How do bounces affect email bounce rate?

Both soft and hard bounces increase your email bounce rate, but hard bounces usually have a stronger negative impact. Keeping hard bounces low is a key indicator of good list hygiene.

Why is bounce management important for transactional emails?

Transactional emails are time-sensitive. Bounce management ensures quick retries for temporary failures and suppression of invalid addresses to prevent repeated delivery issues.

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MarketingMessageFlow Blog

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