Bounce types and subtypes
A bounce is an email that is returned because it cannot be delivered for some reason. When an email cannot be delivered, it bounces back to the sender.
In general, there is a distinction between two kinds of bounced emails. Where possible, Agile Research will provide the exact bounce reason for both types of bounces so you know whether to correct the contact and resend the invitation or to remove the email address entirely, from both the survey and your own database.
Agile Research only reports permanent and transient bounces that will no longer be retried by our email engine. In other words, your recipient did not receive your email message and we will not try to resend it.
Permanent bounces
A permanent or hard bounce is an email that has been returned to you because the recipient's address is invalid. A permanent bounce might occur because of a spelling mistake in the email address, the domain name doesn't exist, or the recipient is unknown.
If you are unable to correct the email address, we recommend that you remove the email addresses that have returned bounces marked as permanent from your mailing list, as we do not believe that you will be able to successfully send to them in the future. Make sure to also update your own contact records so you do not use this email address again in the future
Transient bounces
A transient or soft bounce is usually temporary. One of the most common causes for a soft bounce is a full mailbox or some type of temporary network problem on the recipient's end. These days, a full mailbox may indicate an 'abandoned mailbox' since most email services offer huge amounts of space. If a server cannot be reached, our system retries for several hours before marking an email address as bounced. In the contacts overview these will be tagged as transient bounces.
Transient bounces are sent to you when all retry attempts have been exhausted and will no longer be retried. In the future you may be able to successfully resend to an address that initially resulted in a transient bounce.
Bounce subtypes
In the contact report, you will be able to review the exact bounce type as well as the bounce subtype. This subtype provides some more information as to the exact reason of the bounce.
This is an overview of all possible types and subtypes, along with a short description:
| Bounce type | Bounce subtype | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Permanent | General | We received a general hard bounce and recommends that you remove the recipient's email address from your mailing list. |
| Permanent | NoEmail | We received a permanent hard bounce because the target email address does not exist. It is recommended that you remove that recipient from your mailing list. |
| Permanent | Suppressed | We has suppressed sending to this address because it has a recent history of bouncing as an invalid address. |
| Transient | General | We received a general bounce. You may be able to successfully retry sending to that recipient in the future. |
| Transient | MailboxFull | We received a mailbox full bounce. You may be able to successfully retry sending to that recipient in the future. |
| Transient | MessageTooLarge | We received a message too large bounce. You may be able to successfully retry sending to that recipient if you reduce the message size. |
| Transient | ContentRejected | We received a content rejected bounce. You may be able to successfully retry sending to that recipient if you change the message content. |
| Transient | AttachmentRejected | We received an attachment rejected bounce. You may be able to successfully retry sending to that recipient if you remove or change the attachment. |
