Soft Bounces And Hard Bounces

When an email sent from Democracy Direct is returned as “bounced,” it falls into one of two categories: Hard bounce or Soft bounce. We will explain the differences as you may notices these metrics on the bottom of an individual email dashboard.

Soft bounces

A soft bounce is a temporary delivery failure.

In this scenario, your email was received by the mail server as being as valid and recognized email address, but the email could not be delivered to the end user however. The common reasons for soft bounces are

• Full inbox

• Server issues with mail server used by the recipient (server down, server overload, etc)

• The email may be too large

• The sender may be blocked by the recipient

• The email may look suspicious or like spam

Email addresses that are recorded with soft bounce can be used with subsequent emails, however our system will no longer attempt to deliver this particular email to the recipient.