Bounced Email Guide

Rob Howard Updated by Rob Howard

When sending email, you will occasionally receive a notification in DailyStory that your message bounced.

What is a bounced email

A bounced email is a notification from the recipient's email system informing the sender that the message has not been delivered (or another delivery problem occurred). The original message is said to have "bounced".

What causes email to bounce

There can be numerous causes that lead to an email server preventing delivery of your message:

  • An email filter prevented delivery of your message
  • The recipients inbox is full and is out of storage
  • The email address no longer exists
  • The amount of email sent to the domain it too high a volume in too short a time period

Types of bounces

There are two distinct types of bounces that can occur.

If you receive a high bounce rate on an email send DailyStory will throttle delivery of additional messages.
Soft Bounce

A temporary issue related to the recipient's email server preventing delivery.

  • Code usually starts with "4xx"

Soft bounces usually resolve themselves. DailyStory will continue checking the status of a soft bounced email for up to 12 hours.

Hard Bounce

A permanent issue related to the recipient's email server.

  • Message couldn't be delivered due to some sort of invalid, unchangeable, permanent reason
  • Some are in your control and some are not (see below for tips for what is in your control)
  • Code usually starts with "5xx"
To check your SPAM score (a numerical rating 0-10), you can use a free site like https://www.mail-tester.com/ to understand if your emails are at risk.

How to prevent bounced emails

There are several steps you can take to prevent emails from bouncing. And we recommend reading our detailed blog post for avoiding the junk folder and preventing bounced emails.

Use clean and verified data

It's important that you keep your email lists clean and up-to-date.

  • Refrain from using unreliable contact lists
  • Remove incorrect or old emails which affect your bounce rate
  • Use a service such as NeverBounce to verify the deliverability of email addresses

Avoid common content SPAM triggers

There are number of known SPAM triggers that you can avoid.

  • Avoid numerous exclamation points. This can trigger mail providers to block your email as SPAM.
  • Use standard fonts and colors. Unrecognized fonts and colors can trigger your email as SPAM.
  • Compress images and use the rule of thumb of 70% text and 30% images.
  • Remove excessive links. Emails will be flagged as SPAM if there are more than 6 links.

Avoid common SPAM words and phrases

Below is a list of common words and phrases to avoid, especially in your subject lines or preview text:

% off

$$

100% free

Act Now

Avoid

Beneficiary

Best Price

Billion

Cash Bonus

Certified

Chance

Cheap

Claims

Clearance

Click Here

Compare Rates

Credit

Don't Delete

Don't Hesitate

Double your

Earn $

Earn Extra Cash

Explode Your Business

Extra Income

Free

Fast Cash

Full refund

Get Started Now

Great Offer

Guaranteed

Help

Hidden

Hidden Costs

Increase Sales

Increase Traffic

Incredible Deal

Instant

Lifetime

Limited Time Offer

Make $

Miracle

Never

No gimmicks

Now Only

Obligation

Offer Expires

One Time

Opportunity

Order

Order Now

Order Today

Please Read

Potential Earnings

Prices

Promise You

Refinance

Reminder

Remove

Risk Free

Sample

Satisfaction

Search Listing

See For Yourself

Serious Cash

Shopper

Special Promotion

Stop

Supplies Limited

Test

Thousands

Time Limited

Trial

Urgent

Visit our Website

Why Pay More?

An acceptable bounce rate is between 2-5%. Anything over 5% suggests a problem you need to address and resolve. DailyStory report dashboards give you bounce % rates for individual emails and emails within a timeframe you can set.

Bounced status reports in DailyStory

When viewing bounced reports in DailyStory, you will see the type of bounce and the bounce code.

To see a complete list of your bounced contacts, navigate to Contacts > Search Contacts from the Navigation Bar menu and select Bounced from the Status field row.

Bounced contacts will not be reflected in saved segments numbers or appear in saved segment lists, so you cannot save this search as a segment. To work with your bounced list, create the search and then export the list.

Bounce code descriptions

Code

Description

421

service not available, closing transmission channel

450

Requested mail action not taken: mailbox unavailable (e.g., mailbox busy)

451

Requested action aborted: error in processing

452

Requested action not taken: insufficient system storage

500

The server could not recognize the command due to a syntax error.

501

A syntax error was encountered in command arguments.

502

This command is not implemented.

503

The server has encountered a bad sequence of commands.

504

A command parameter is not implemented.

550

User’s mailbox address is invalid

551

The recipient is not local to the server.

552

The action was aborted due to exceeded storage allocation.

553

The command was aborted because the mailbox name is invalid.

554

The transaction failed for some unstated reason.

602

Interal error code that messages bounced after attempts over 8 hours.

How Did We Do?

Troubleshoot Email Delivery

How to Warm-Up an IP address

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