Emails Bounced

What is Emails Bounced?

Emails Bounced is the count of emails that were not successfully delivered. Specifically, it's the count of Non-Delivery Receipts from your recipients' email servers.

Alternate names: Non-Delivery Receipt, NDR

How to calculate Emails Bounced

ƒ Count(Emails Bounced)

What is a good Emails Bounced benchmark?

According to Mailchimp, the global average hard bounce rate is 2.5% and 0.6% for a soft bounce.

Email Soft Bounce Rate by Industry
Mailchimp, Mar 2018
Email Hard Bounce Rate by Industry
Mailchimp, Mar 2018
Email Soft Bounce Rate by Industry
Mailchimp, Mar 2018
Email Hard Bounce Rate by Industry
Mailchimp, Mar 2018

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Example

You send a newsletter to 50,000 email addresses. Looking at your Non-Delivery Report a day or two later, you find that your list had 250 hard bounces, 30 soft bounces, and a current count of 20 pending bounces (that could turn into soft bounces soon). The hard bounces indicate that the quality of your list was not as good as you hoped. The soft bounces are a reminder to make sure your emails are getting through security filters and you have no technical issues when sending.

More about this metric

Email bounces are generally categorized into three types: hard bounces, soft bounces, and pending bounces.

A hard bounce usually points to a permanent error, such as an invalid email address, but can also be caused by a strict email security filter, abandoned mailboxes, or if the inbox is full. Typically, mass email delivery services will exclude "hard bounce" email addresses in future mailings.

A soft bounce is generally a temporary issue, such as if the recipient’s email server is timing out or undergoing maintenance. Before being counted as a soft bounce, these emails will be marked as pending bounces.

A pending bounce is also caused by a temporary technical issue. Pending bounces are retried and, if they still cannot be delivered, are then marked as soft bounces.