About Bounced and Skipped Emails

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

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

Please 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).

Please note:

You won’t be charged for skipped emails.

Here are the main reasons for skipped emails.

Rejected

Emails can be rejected because:

• The 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.

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:

• @txt.att.net

• @vtext.com

• @tmomail.com

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.