What is a Bounced email?

• A bounced email is an email that was unable to be delivered or returned do to many potential factors.  Bounces are classified as permanent and temporary.  These can include but are not limited to the following:
  • Permanent Bounces
    • Domain name does not exist
    • Mail server is not responding
    • Email address does not exist
  • Temporary Bounces
    • Users mailbox is full
    • Vacation or out of office reply
    • Spam detection

What is an acceptable level of permanent Bounces?

• The exact number of bounces to trigger your account to be paused or shut down is dependent on several factors such as the age of your account, the size of your list, and the number of complaints.  In general, a clean opt-in mailing list typically should have less than 5% of its emails bouncing.

How can I reduce my number of permanent Bounces?

• Only send to opt-in email lists
• Review bounces after each mailing and add any that are permanent bounces to the Removes list.  The system will automatically add most permanent bounces to the removes list, but not all due to response messages from mail servers that are ambiguous.

How is it possible that an email bounces yet shows that the email was opened and or clicked?

Some email servers will accept an email, process it and then bounce back.  In this scenerio the email was successfully delivered to the receiving mail server.  Then the receiving mail server processes the email like a user for spam or viruses of which triggers the open or click statistic.   After the receiving server processes the email it then determines that the email has a fatal error and bounces the email back.  So the end result is an email with a status of bounced with a click or view.