When you send an email campaign, you want it to land directly in your contact's inbox. However, sometimes the recipient's mail server rejects the message. This rejection is known as a "bounce".
Understanding bounces is essential for maintaining a healthy contacts list. If you continue to send emails to addresses that consistently bounce, email providers like Gmail or Yahoo may flag you as a spammer, making it harder for your messages to reach your active audience. Positive User handles these situations automatically to keep your deliverability high.
Email Bouncing is the status assigned to an email that could not be delivered to a recipient's server. These statuses appear within your campaign reports in the “Campaigns” section.
Bounces are split into two categories based on whether the delivery failure is permanent or temporary.
For example, if you send an email to an address with the typo like "[email protected]", the server will return a bounce message because that domain doesn't exist.
Hard Bounces: These indicate a permanent reason why an email cannot be delivered. In most cases, Positive User automatically removes these addresses from your active contacts to prevent further sending. Common reasons include a non-existent email address or a recipient server that has blocked delivery entirely.
Soft Bounces: These indicate a temporary delivery issue. The contact remains in your list, but the specific email didn't go through this time. If a contact soft bounces repeatedly (typically 7 to 15 times depending on their previous engagement), they will eventually be treated as a "hard bounce".
Via Campaign Reports: Go to "Campaigns" → "Email".
Via Contact Profile: Open a specific contact profile → Check the timeline for delivery failures.
Via Filters: Use the filters in the “Contacts” section to find people with a specific bounce status.
Monitoring your bounces helps you maintain a clean database and ensures your marketing budget isn't wasted on dead leads.
Automated Database Hygiene: If you launch a "Re-engagement" campaign and several addresses return a hard bounce because the contacts have changed jobs and their old professional emails no longer exist, Positive User will identify these hard bounces in real-time and exclude them from all future campaigns.
Strategic Troubleshooting: If you notice that your monthly newsletter has a higher-than-usual soft bounce rate for a specific segment, then you can isolate everyone with a soft bounce status to see if there is a pattern. Instead of deleting them, you create an automation: "if email status is soft bounce, send an SMS or a web push notification instead."
High-touch Customer Support: If you want to be notified if a high-value lead's email bounces, then you can set up an automation triggered by a change of the bounce attribute. You can then assign a task to a team member to reach out to that person to update their details.
Always use a company domain (e.g., @yourcompany.com) rather than a free service like @gmail.com for your sender address.
Hard bounces are removed from the recipient lists automatically, so you don't need to manually delete them to stay compliant with anti-spam rules.
