Support

What’s the difference between hard and soft bounces?

Bounces are emails that are returned to the sender, because they cannot be delivered for a given reason. There are two kinds of bounces: hard bounces and soft bounces.

Hard Bounce: A hard bounce means that BoldInbox sends your email, but the recipient's server rejects it outright. Hard bounces are usually a permanent issue and those email addresses need to be removed immediately from your mailing list. No worries, as BoldInbox automatically manages your hard bounces for you and removes them from your active mailing list :)

• Reasons: Typos in email address; Account does not exist; Domain does not exist; etc.
• How do we manage hard bounces? As soon as there is a hard bounce, we remove the email address from your account immediately. We do the hard work for you so that email servers don't penalize you for resending to bad accounts or bad domains

Soft Bounce: A soft bounce means that BoldInbox sent your email, the recipient server processed the email and returned to BoldInbox without delivering. Soft bounces are usually a temporary issue.

• Reasons: Recipients mailbox is full; Server temporarily unavailable; etc.
• How do we manage soft bounces? For an initial soft bounce, we will continue to attempt to deliver the email for up to 3 days. If still unsuccessful, we will count it as 1 official soft bounce against that particular contact. Any contact will be removed from your account after 5 official soft bounces.

Helpful BoldInbox Hints:

1. Avoid Stale Lists: You can easily avoid having a stale list by sending an email communication, whatever form it may be, soon after obtaining permission to send, because waiting too long before sending your first campaign, or waiting too long between campaigns and too infrequent campaigns may lead your subscribers to forget about you or that they wished to hear from you in the first place.
2. Clean Up Stale Lists: Remove outdated email address that are inactive or that you have not had any contact with for the past 6 months or more.
3. Double Opt-In: Remove email addresses that you cannot show proof of permission for sending emails to them. It is generally recommended in the email marketing community to utilize the double opt-in method, in which the user first signs up on a signup form and then receives an email requiring them to click a link to approve the subscription.
4. Be Clear About What You'll Be Sending: It is very important that you set up clear expectations of what you will be sending, what content, promotions or communications your subscribers can expect to receive from you and how often. They'll be less inclined to unsubscribe or report you as SPAM, if they know who you are and expect to hear from you in their inbox.
5. Don't Use Purchased Lists: BoldInbox is strictly permission based email marketing and the use of purchased lists in any form are strictly prohibited.
6. Formatting Errors on Import: Double check and make sure that your spreadsheet or file is cleaned up with only the info you'd like to import. Then, make sure each column has proper titles, such as Email Address, First Name, etc., where each column represent a single category. Do not use special/unusual characters.