Bounce management

Talking about bounces, we mean emails that can’t be delivered to an email address. Depending on the type of bounce and the email domain, the eworx Marketing Suite will automatically deactivate the subscriber after one or more failed delivery attempts.

We distinguish between two types of bounces, that in turn are divided into different categories – depending on the bounce reason.

Hard bounce: Severe, permanent error

Thereby we differentiate between email address status, security or authentification status and undefined hard bounce.

In the following we show you the meaning of the single categories as well as examples of hard bounce categories:

Email address status:

This points out non-existing email addresses at the receiving server.
Bounces of this category can look like this:

Security or authentification status:

These bounces give a hint on security or authentification problems in the delivery of the newsletter.
Bounces of this category can look like this:

Undefined hard bounce:

These are undefined errors which are categorized as hard bounces.
Bounces of this category can look like this:

Soft bounce: Slight, temporary error

Thereby we differentiate between mailbox status, network status, limit status and undefined soft bounce.

In the following we show you the meaning of the single categories as well as examples of soft bounce categories:

Mailbox status:

This shows temporary problems of the subscribers‘ mailboxes.
Bounces of this category can look like this:

Network status:

This points out that there have been errors in delivering the newsletter.
Bounces of this category can look like this:

Limit status:

Hereby the newsletters could not be delivered because the limitation of the receiving server has been exceeded.
Bounces of this category can look like this:

Undefined soft bounce:

These are undefined errors which are categorized as soft bounces.
Bounces of this category can look like this:

The bounce limit is the number of failed delivery attempts allows, before the eworx Marketing Suite deactivates the subscriber and excludes the email address from future email campaign sends. There are different bounce limits depending on the type of bounce and the affected email provider. This is because some email providers penalize delivery attempts to invalid email addresses or spam complaints harder than others.

Hard bounces are deactivated either after the first, or at the latest after the second failed delivery attempt.

Soft bounces are temporary errors – usually there is no need to deactivate them. When the email address continues to soft bounce it will be deactivated after 3 to 5 failed delivery attempts.

Why is it necessary to deactivate bounces?

Deactivating bounces automatically and excluding them from future email campaign sends doesn’t only reduce the costs of sending. More importantly, it contributes to a high data quality and avoids that you find yourself on an email provider’s black list.

When clicking on Subscribers in the navigation, you can see a dashboard with the number of predicted email bounces. When you click on the respective bar, you get to the maintenance area. Another way to get there is over the main navigation Subscribers / Maintenance.

The drop-down-menu allows you to select between the lists of predicted, recognized and already disabled bounces.

Predicted bounces
If an email address has already bounced before, when sending via the mailworx infrastructure, it will be listed as predicted bounce. As it is not possible to specify the type of bounce, there’s no need for you to take action, except that you detect incorrect email addresses or you know about recipients who changed their place of employment.

Recognized bounces
These email addresses have already led to bounces in your eworx Marketing Suite account. In this list you can also see the bounce statistic. It tells you how many delivery attempts failed so far.

Already disabled bounces
The automatically deactivated email addresses can be found in this list. Check whether you find email addresses that need to be corrected.

Should predicted or recognized bounces be deactivated by hand?

As long as there are no email addresses with spelling mistakes that could be corrected, there is no need to take action, because mailworx will deactivate the bounces if necessary. Those subscribers will be labelled as „automatically deactivated“ so you will know that the deactivation resulted from a bounce later on.

Of course, it is also possible to deactivate those subscribers by hand, but this makes it more difficult to remember the reason why you did it later on.

What is the difference between invalid email addresses and bounces?

In the maintenance area, you can see the tab „invalid email addresses“ next to the tab „bounces“. When the eworx Marketing Suite notices that an email is incorrect it will exclude it from email campaign send in advance – so there won’t be a bounce. Check the list of invalid email addresses temporarily, because most of the time you can detect spelling mistakes that can easily be corrected.

By the way: Make sure that you don’t import invalid email addresses into the newsletter system. The easiest way to identify those incorrect email addresses is to have a look at the maintenance area right after the import. When creating subscribers manually, you get a warning hint that the email address is invalid.

Bounces can also result from invalid email addresses. The difference is that those mistakes can’t be identified technically in advance.

What can I do about a large number of bounces due to invalid email addresses?

When you notice that a great number of email addresses has been disabled due to obvious spelling mistakes, that you could easily correct, we recommend the following approach.

1. Export the list of „already disabled bounces“ and enable the checkbox „Internal ID“ for the export. Later you will need the ID as key criterion for the import, as you can’t use the email address for the data actualization this case.
2. Correct the email addresses in the Excel spreadsheet.
3. Import the corrected data as CSV-file and select the internal ID as key criterion.
4. Importing the correct email addresses will automatically reactivate the corresponding subscribers and reset the bounce counter.