Michael: Bounces are a remove emails that bounce part of email marketing, but that doesn’t mean they have to be permanent. It’s important to remove emails that bounce from your list promptly so that you don’t continue to send messages to invalid addresses that can harm your deliverability.

An email that bounces is an error message that indicates a failure to deliver the message to the email recipient. This can be a temporary problem such as the email recipient having exceeded their mailbox storage limit, or it can be permanent, such as the email address being undeliverable due to typos or an outdated email system.

“Optimizing Email Lists: Removing Bounced Addresses

Emails that bounce because they’re full can be temporarily addressed by simply sending the email again, as many email service providers retry delivery for a time period before marking an email as a soft bounce. However, if an email continues to bounce after multiple attempts, that’s a sign that the email address is no longer valid and should be removed from your mailing list.

On the other hand, emails that hard bounce are a permanent issue that should be dealt with immediately. Continuing to send email to non-existent addresses will not only hurt your delivery rates, but it could also lead to your email account being placed on spam traps or even blocked altogether. To avoid this, you should regularly review your mailing lists and remove email addresses that no longer exist from them.