I’m Radek from Bouncer, and am super excited to land in your mailbox as a part of the 30 Days to Better Email series. What an unbelievable pack of experts sharing awesome tips, right?
I guess you have experienced, as anyone communicating with humans over email, a bounced email message, or two, or hundreds of them…
And even though they usually cause our blood pressure to increase a bit, believe me or not, they are very useful for us. Thanks to bounce messages we know that our message was not delivered to the recipient. Thus they help us maintain trust and confidence in the reliability of the Internet’s mail system – if we don’t get a bounce back message it means it did go through.
Today I’d like to shed some light on what bounce messages may tell you about your sender reputation.
But before we kick it off, if you’d like to read more about bounces themselves, and sender reputation – here you can find some more information in our blog posts at Bouncer:
- The ultimate guide to bounce backs
- What is an average email bounce rate
- Email sender reputation and how to protect it
Now with the stage set…
Studies show that (especially for business emails) up to 20% of email addresses get obsolete in just one year – mostly due to people changing their jobs, but also due to companies getting unfortunately out of business.
Furthermore, even up to 15% of email addresses are invalid at the moment of entry – due to mistypes (on registration forms), misspells (over a phone) or sometimes because people put invalid emails intentionally, if they don’t trust us enough to leave their real email address.
Other studies show that, if our bounce rate is around 20% – then our sender reputation may decrease tremendously resulting in the whole deliverability dropping down even by 50%, as we land on blacklists and our messages get blocked.
Bounces are a natural thing in email communication, though, and all email service providers acknowledge it, but recommend us to keep the bounce rate below 5%, and thus encourage us to incorporate proper practices to keep our lists clean.
With that said, we will not escape from bounces, but what is important is what we do about them. And the best thing to do, is to incorporate practices to analyse the bounces, try to recover connections (i.e. by reaching to a person with other channels) or if needed by removing a contact, so we don’t try to send to undeliverable email addresses in the future.
Now, what actually bounces tell us about our sender reputation?
If we built our contact list organically, and have kept it clean (if needed with the help of email verification solutions like Bouncer), then most likely we should be getting a more or less stable amount of bounce messages over a time. If we properly manage them, then we will most likely be on a safe site of 2-3% of Bounces, and this will be a natural thing.
We will be most likely getting bounce messages saying that:
-
Email address does not exist
Meaning most likely that a person is not anymore with the company.
Bounce messages will include some clues like:
– Address rejected,
– No such user here,
– Bad destination mailbox address,
– Unknown or illegal alias,
– The account is suspended or disabled -
Mailbox full
That may be a temporary situation, where the recipient’s account is full. But let’s be honest – these days, when we all have mailboxes of a size of gigabytes – this probably means that the email account has been abandoned, or downsized by the administrator because a person left the company. -
DNS Failure
That may mean that it’s a temporary issue, when the recipient’s domain and email configuration is invalid, or that company went out of business
-
Message too large
Saying that we sent too heavy an email.
And it’s all OK, as long as we do something about it.
But if at some point we will start getting more bounces this definitely is an indication that something is wrong with our practices.
It may happen when:
- we haven’t been sending messages for a while, and before the send outs we have not put some safety measurements and cleaned a list,
- we, for some reason, stopped practices of managing bounces,
- we brought some new contacts on board and did not properly vetted them out,
- our reputation has been decreased.
When we start getting more bounces than normally, the first thing we should do would be to look at the bounce messages themselves, cause there may be some indications there.
We should definitely be sensitive to messages like:
1. Mail block – spam detected
This usually means that the content of the message was categorized as potential spam. But it can also mean that our sender reputation is becoming poor 
2. Mail block – known spammer
This is bad! It means that the email server of a recipient has blocked your email because of your poor sender reputation. This may happen because: – your domain is blacklisted, – your sending IP address are blocked, – the past emails you have been sending to this server have been consistently resembling spam.
Those last situations definitely tell us that we should stop sending emails, not to make things worse, and should start recovering from the disaster.
I’m sure that no one of us will ever experience it, as we are in a good company of amazing experts, with plenty of tips and best practices that we’ll prevent us from such challenges.
And on that note… thanks a lot for your attention! I know it was a looooong piece to digest. 
If at any point you’d like to reach out to me – feel free to email me at radek@usebouncer.com.
Cheers to email!
Radek