Bounced Email Guide

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.

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"

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

See our article Keyword blocklists: What they do and whether you should use them to access and download common SPAM keywords to avoid.

Bounce code descriptions

Bounce and retry handling

DailyStory includes advanced logic for bounce/retry logic to automatically reset emails if a non-hard bounce error occurs.

For example, email recipients that return a bounce status due to:

• Inbox full
• Inbox over quota
• Inbox temporarily disabled

If a recipient is sent an email and a soft bounce is returned, the 'do not contact until' date is automatically set to a random date between four and seven days in the future. This is done to prevent sending multiple emails to an inbox that is not accepting them and potentially damaging the senders reputation.