Why emails fail to reach in-box

Why emails fail to reach in-box

Marketer, we have a problem!
It's nothing new, but it's getting bad. Recently one of our partner's email was black listed by their ISP. We checked with ISP to know if it's a spam issue. Surprisingly the issue came from email bounces.

Before we go in detail, let's understand more about email bounces and the types of bounces.

Email bounce happens when your email can't get through the recipient's in-box. Reason for email bounces are notified to the sender thorugh an automatically generated message.

There are two types of bounce. Soft bounce and a hard bounce.

Soft bounces happen when your email cannot be delivered to an address due to a temporary error.

• Inactive Account
• Message too large
• Temporary Domain failure
• Out of Office
  
• Mailbox full

A hard bounce indicates the non-delivery of email due to a permanent error.

Most common reasons for hard bounce:

• Bad address syntax
• Address does not exist
• Unknown domain
• Invalid domain

Recent report show that major email clients like AOL are filtering email based on hard bounces. This shows the importance of list hygiene in email campaigns. Rise in email bounces is a hint about the rising number of junk data in your database.

If you're experencing email bounces beyong 5%, then it's time to give a thought about list-management. Steady list cleansing activity will keep dubious data from entering your system. Moreover, list managment efforts will bolster your relationship with ISP's and keep your goldmine intact for more golden deals.