We’ve already discussed soft bounce, why it occurs, hard bounces and how to fix it. Now, let’s take a look at hard bounce.
A hard bounce significantly impacts the deliverability of your B2B emails and hinders your business development.
These are the questions we are going to answer in this short article.
What is a hard bounce?
A hard bounce or soft bounce is an email that is undeliverable. This means there’s no way for your email to reach its destination.
This can happen for a variety of reasons, from an list to data invalid email address to the recipient’s server blocking your emails.
In any case, you should take hard bounces seriously, as they are an indicator that something is wrong with your recipients or your own email reputation.
Useful tip
Sometimes, a hard bounce appears to be a soft bounce. This occurs when email servers return incorrect codes , something you should pay close attention to.
What causes a hard bounce?
An email usually bounces when the email address does not exist.
If you use LaGrowthMachine, this will be almost align your sales process with your marketing process impossible, since by enriching your leads, we guarantee that all addresses are valid before adding them to your database.
Brace yourselves, this is going to get technical
We ping the server, asking, “Is this email in your database?” and then wait for a response—so to speak.
If the server is configured to use a “Catch-All” configuration, it will literally “catch everything.” This means it will always respond, “Yes, the email is indeed in my database.”
The problem with this is that even if the address doesn’t exist, it will respond positively. So you’d be sending emails to an address that simply doesn’t exist, thus causing a hard bounce.
Therefore, if the server is in catch-all mode, we will not be able to validate the email address.
We’ve designed LaGrowthMachine to never provide an invalid email address
On the other hand, the recipient’s Internet clean email Service Provider (ISP) may reject your email for various reasons:
- Invalid Address: A hard bounce can be hard bounces caused by an email address that doesn’t exist or isn’t valid. It can’t be delivered to the recipient.
- Domain/IP Blocked: Your domain has been blocked by your ISP.
- Spam filters: Most ISPs have anti-spam filters.
- Unauthorized Sender Errors: The address is not authorized on the ISP’s mail server for security reasons.
- The email address is associated with a closed account: The account has been closed, deleted, or suspended.
- Email domain: Does not exist or is inactive.