Email Bounces

An email bounce signifies non-delivery of your email message. When this happens, the mailer will receive an automatic notification of the delivery failure. This failure originates from the recipient’s mail server for a number of reasons (explained below).

Soft Bounce

A soft bounce means that the email address was valid and the email message reached the recipient’s mail server but count not be delivered to the inbox. Common soft bounce reasons include:

  • The mailbox was full (over quota)
  • The message was throttled
  • The server was down
  • The message was too large for the recipient’s inbox
  • The message does not meet the recipient server's anti-spam, anti-virus, or DMARC requirements

When an email soft bounces, Ascent360 will continue to attempt to send these messages for up to 72 hours until the message is delivered. If a message is continuously deferred for 72 hours, we will stop trying the resend for that particular email, but they will be eligible to receive other sends in the future.


Hard bounce

A hard bounce occurs when the message has been permanently rejected either because:

  • The email address is invalid
  • The email addresses does not exist

Ascent360 adds these hard bounced addresses to a suppression list and they will be excluded from future sends.