We are often asked to describe the difference between a ‘hard bounce” email and a ’soft bounce’ email. Ennect mail gives a separate report on both the hard bounces and the soft bounces.
A hard bounce is when an email address is simply invalid. This may be because either the name of the recipient does not exist or the name is not recognized by the email server, the domain name itself does not exist, or there may be some sort of technical problem on the receiving end of the email.
A soft bounce is an email that actually reached the email server destination, but never reached the recipient. This may be because the recipient has a full email box, or they are on vacation and have their ‘out of office reply’ set. In the case of a soft bounce the email address does exist. The server has allowed the email to accepted, but it is not received by the recipient.
Knowing these definitions should help with the task of ongoing list management: meaning, a hard bounce is an email address that does not exist, so it is always a good idea to remove any emails from your list have been defined as a ‘hard bounce’. A best-practice tip would be to review your list of hard bounces, just to insure that there are no misspellings that could have caused the email to never be delivered. Once you have insured that there are no obvious human errors, you should remove all of those hard bounces from your list. This is actually a practice that should happen after each email blast sent, for every list!
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