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Automated Email Bounce Management System.

When you send a message to an email address you expect the receiving server to receive and store the

message for the recipient. However this is not always the case. Sometimes, for many different reasons, the

message is bounced back to the sending server, often with a standard error code and brief explanation as to why

the message was rejected. It may have bounced because the recipient address is non-existent, or because the

recipient’s mailbox is full, or because the receiving server has permanently closed down.

Whatever the reason, precious resources are utilized on both the sending and receiving servers. When a server

sends or receives millions of messages a day, weeding out the erroneous address can substantially increase a

server’s operating capacity.

By automatically removing email addresses from User’s Mailing Lists, a sending server can focus on dispatching

mail with a greater chance of being successfully delivered, a receiving server doesn’t need to process and return

a message with bounce information, and the User sending the message doesn’t need to manually delete the

offending address from all of their Mailing Lists. So to save everyone time, effort and money, we automatically

process all bounces.

How we classify bounces

The industry standard for bounced email broadly categorizes bounces as either Hard Bounces or Soft bounces.

A Hard Bounce is a bounce which should not be sent to again and is assigned an error code in the 5.0.X to 5.1.X

range. These bounces include email addresses that have been abandoned or never existed. A Soft Bounce is a

bounce that is expected to be only temporary, and includes email addresses that have reached their data limit

(inbox full), servers that have reached their data limits and server’s experiencing problems.

The error codes number in the hundreds, and we’ve developed a system to deal with most of them, so you don’t

have to. Bounced messages need to be handled carefully so that only addresses that are definitely dis-functional

are removed from a User’s Mailing List.

Hard bounces

When we receive a message we believe is a Hard Bounce we’ll immediately remove it from the Mailing List that

sent a message to it, remove it from your temporary Mailing List, remove it from the Mailing List’s AutoResponder

Series if it was due to be sent an AutoResponder and add it to yourLocal Filter to prevent it from being re-

introduced into any of your Mailing Lists.

Soft bounces

When we receive a message we believe is a Soft Bounce we’ll mark it as such and increment the bounce count for

that particular email address. If that same email addresses continues to bounce in future campaigns, we’ll

eventually deem it to be an abandoned account and treat it as though it were a Hard Bounce.

When a bounces isn’t a bounce

When you change email marketing service providers, you may find the your bounce rate also changes. This is

because a sending server’s reputation plays a role in bounces. On a busy server receiving email, the server’s

administrator’s are under constant pressure to weed out and protect their Users from SPAM and they build

systems to automate and alleviate the server’s incoming and outgoing load. When they come across messages

that are undoubtedly from a SPAMmer, or from a known SPAMming source, they will often hard bounce

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messages (send back a false positive) in the hope that the addresses will be removed from the Mailing Lists, or

that the sender will no longer attempt to send email to the non-receptive recipient server.

This is just one of many reasons why we aim to prevent any SPAM ever leaving our servers and comply to strict

industry standards when processing outgoing mail. More legitimate mail will be accepted by the major ISPs, our

reputation as a responsible service provider will improve and our Users will enjoy the benefits of higher delivery

rates which in turn improve their return on investment.

So a bounce is not always what it appears to be. However while we continue to provide an ethics driven service

to you and our Users, you can be pretty sure that a bounce is a bounce.

What you should do with bounces

No system is perfect. Bounce and SPAM filtering system are not based on an absolute science. They rely heavily

on the programmer’s *idea* of how things will or should work. The server bouncing the message may have gotten

it wrong, the server processing the bounce may be of ill-repute and been tricked into thinking an email address

was dead. This is why for every bounce received, we store a record of that bounce for you. Our policy states that

a bounced message cannot be re-entered into any of your Mailing Lists, and our system prevents this. However

you have the ability to export all bounced email addresses and test them on a third party system. If you can

convince us that some addresses which were marked as hard bounces do actually exist, we will happily restore

them for you and investigate further so that future delivery will succeed.