Deliverability and infrastructure

Bounce rate

Definition

Bounce rate is the share of sent emails that could not be delivered, from hard bounces such as invalid addresses or soft bounces such as full mailboxes.

Bounce rate in practice

A hard bounce is permanent: the address does not exist or the domain does not accept mail. A soft bounce is temporary: a full mailbox, a server that is down, or a message that was too large. Hard bounces are the ones that hurt, because sending to addresses that do not exist is a classic sign of a bought or scraped list.

Bounce rate is a list quality metric before it is a deliverability metric. Verify every address before it enters a sequence, suppress hard bounces permanently, and treat a rising bounce rate as a reason to stop and check the data source.

DeliverabilityEmail verificationSuppressionDomain reputationBounce rate
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Last updated 2026-10-14 by Ishan Vats.

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