When you are sending large amounts of emails, it’s inevitable that some will bounce. There are many reasons for email getting bounced by receiving server. Reasons can be like: there was a typo in the email address, the receiving email server is down, the recipient's mail account is deleted, or something else.
How Growlytics handles delivery failures and bounces?
When Growlytics receives bounces and complaints, Growlytics internally marks the email invalid, making sure no more communication happens on that email and your domain reputation is maintained.
The following table explains the reasons for emails getting undelivered, the details of them, and what Growlytics does in those particular scenarios.
Reason | Type | Description | Growlytics Action |
Bounce | Hard Bounce | An email account is deleted or invalid email address. | Mark email as invalid and don't send emails. |
| Soft Bounce | Email storage is full or for some reason can't accept emails right now. | Don't send emails for the next 5 days. |
| Autoresponder | Out of Office, "Your message was received", etc. | No action. |
Spams | Complaint | Email owner marked your email as spam. | Mark email as invalid and don't send emails. |
| Blocked | The recipient email server stopped accepting emails for any reason. | Mark email as invalid and don't send emails. Better you investigate why this is happening with your ESP. |
| Notification | The recipient email server blocked delivery of an email due to do domain or IP reputation problem. | Mark email as invalid and don't send emails. Better you investigate this issue with your ESP. |
What should you do for handling bounces?
In most cases, Growlytics automatically handles different bounce and spam scenarios. But for the following scenarios, it's better if you get in touch with your Email Service Provider and investigate the root cause of delivery failure and fix it.
Domain Reputation Issue: If emails are bouncing under this category, it's better if you get in touch with your ESP, discuss the root cause, and fix the issue.
Spam(Blocked): For this category, Growlytics does mark email as invalid. But if this happens for the bulk of the emails, it's better you get in touch with your ESP, discuss the root cause, and fix the issue.
While Growlytics, automatically handles the bounces, there are certain scenarios that you should look into and fix it manually.
The normal trend for email delivery failures can be broken down into the following percentages. If your email delivery failures are in this category, this is a normal trend, but if it's not in range, then you should investigate the reason for it and fix it.
Category | Percentage |
Hard Bounces | 80% of delivery failures |
Soft Bounces | 10% of delivery failures |
Spam complaints/notifications | 3% to 4% of delivery failures |
Other | 1% to 2% other delivery failure reasons. |
These numbers will give you a fair idea of what to expect when emails are not delivered.
Best practices to reduce email bounces
Click here to learn more about how you can reduce the emails getting bounced.