About Bounced and Skipped Emails
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About Bounced and Skipped Emails
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Bounced and Skipped Emails Overview
In email marketing, to run effective campaigns and ensure important information gets delivered it's crucial to understand why some messages fail to reach their intended recipients. To better manage these issues, we differentiate between bounced and skipped emails.
When your email fails to reach a recipient, it is considered a bounced email. Skipped emails do not get sent due to predefined rules and conditions.
In this article, you’ll learn what causes emails to bounce or be skipped
Bounced Emails
Bounced emails can be divided into 2 types: hard bounces and soft bounces. Both types can negatively impact your deliverability.
Hard Bounces
When an email is permanently rejected, it is considered a hard bounce. Possible reasons for a hard bounce include:
The email address is invalid
The email address does not exist
The email server has blocked the delivery
Bounce Reason | Explanation |
|---|---|
Invalid Address | This hard bounce occurs when you send a message to an email address that doesn’t exist, often due to typos, outdated addresses, or false entries. |
Technical | This soft bounces happens due to authentication or DNS issues; ensure your sending domain, DMARC, and sender address are correctly configured. |
Connection Failure | This soft bounce indicates a technical problem connecting to the recipient’s mailbox or server, often caused by the recipient’s inbox provider. |
Content | This soft bounce occurs when ISPs detect suspicious or malicious content in your email; follow content best practices to ensure deliverability. |
Reputation | This soft bounce results form ISPs identifying a low sending reputation; improve this by maintaining a clean list and engaging only with active contacts. |
Frequency/Volume | This soft bounce occurs when an ISP cannot process a high volume of messages; increase your sending volume gradually and warm up your domain properly. |
Mailbox Unavailable | This soft bounce happens when a recipient's mailbox is full or misconfigured; consider excluding these bounces from your campaigns. |
Unclassified | This bounce type is returned when the issue is not yet categorized or linked to a specific problem. |
Soft Bounces
If an email reaches the recipient’s email server but is rejected temporarily, it is considered a soft bounce. Possible reasons for a soft bounce include:
The recipient’s mailbox is full
The email server is down or not found
The message is too large
The email server is blocking messages because:
The message includes specific content that is not permitted
The domain does not exist
The DKIM, SPF, or DMARC email authentication requirements are not met
For more information on soft bounces click here.
Note
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are email authentication protocols that help verify the legitimacy of the sender and ensure the integrity of the email content to prevent spoofing and phishing. You can learn more about the protocols in Google’s Help Center.
An email that has soft bounced can be delivered in the future if changes are made to ensure it won't be blocked again.
To reduce the number of soft bounces in your campaigns, we exclude soft-bounced subscribers from the last 3 months by default.
Please note:
After 4 consecutive soft bounces, emails to the recipient will be suppressed. This will happen only if the reason for bouncing is not server or domain-related.
Skipped Emails
An email is skipped when Yotpo does not attempt to send it. Skipped emails do not harm your deliverability as the system prevents them from being sent to the inbox service provider (ISP).
Note
You won’t be charged for skipped emails.
Reasons for Skipped Emails
Rejected
Emails can be rejected because:
A previous message was marked as spam
The recipient unsubscribed
The email addresses were invalid
Stopped
Stopped emails are not sent because the merchant manually stopped the campaign.
Suppression
Suppressed emails are not sent for the following reasons:
They hard bounced, for example, when the recipient's inbox couldn't be reached
A recipient's domain has been identified as non-existent
Restricted Stores
Yotpo identifies potential scammers based on various criteria. If a store is listed as a suspected scammer, emails will not be sent. Stores can be removed from this list if they are found to be legitimate. Restricted stores can reach out to Yotpo Support to be removed from the list.
Daily limitation
If your domain is not authenticated, you can send up to 5,000 emails per day, regardless of your plan. Emails sent beyond this limit will be skipped to avoid potential violations of Google’s and Yahoo’s sender requirements, which could harm your sender reputation. We strongly recommend authenticating your domain. To start the authentication process, go to Settings > General Settings > Email Settings.
Tip
To learn more, see Adding and Authenticating a Sending Domain and Preparing for Google and Yahoo’s New Sender Requirements.
Smart Sending
Smart Sending limits the number of messages sent to prevent you from spamming recipients by sending marketing messages too close together.
Email to SMS Gateway
Due to carrier compliance regulations, sending messages via Email to SMS gateway providers is no longer supported. This method involves sending emails to specific domains of inbox service providers, which then forward the message as an SMS. Examples of these domains include:
Any emails sent to such domains are now skipped.
Tip
If you want to send marketing messages to customers via text, we recommend collecting their consent to contact them directly through SMS. To learn more about the subscriber collection tools Yotpo offers, see Subscriber Collection Tools.
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