What is the difference between hard and soft bounces?
A soft bounce is just a temporary delivery failure. It doesn’t necessarily mean the email address is invalid or no longer active, so you can try to send emails to these addresses again.
These are a few common reasons for a soft bounce:
- The recipient’s mailbox is full.
- The email server is temporarily unavailable.
- The email content is too large.
- It includes spammy content
- It’s sent to a blacklisted sender address.
Often, soft bounces are resolved on their own.
But hard bounces are quite serious.
A hard bounce means there is a permanent reason for the delivery failure. Generally, the recipients’ addresses are immediately added to the “Bounced” list. Frequent hard bounces can drastically reduce the sending sources’ reputation.
Some common reasons for hard bounces include:
- The recipient email address doesn’t exist.
- The domain name doesn’t exist.
- Typos render the email address invalid (e.g., gnail.com instead of gmail.com).
- The recipient email server has blocked delivery.
- The email address is inactive.
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