What are the types of bounce emails?

[subornaakter20]

What is bounce mail? Explaining the mechanism, causes, countermeasures, and risks of ignoring it
2018-09-14(Updated: 2024-12-24 )
SpamEmail Delivery Basics

This time, we will explain how to deal with "bounce mail", a message that is received when an email is not delivered successfully to the recipient.







Table of Contents [Hide]

1. What is a bounce email?
2. How do bounce emails work?
3.1. Soft bounce (temporary error)
3.2. Hard bounce (permanent error)
4. What causes each bounce email?
4.1. Causes of soft bounces
4.1.1. The recipient's mailbox was full
4.1.2. Email size is too large
4.2. Causes of hard bounces
4.2.1. Email address does not exist
DNS Error
5. The impact of ignoring bounced emails on manufacturing email list delivery
5.1. Necessary information is not delivered due to rejection of emails
5.2. Reputation will be damaged
5.3. Your email address will be blacklisted and marked as spam
6. How to deal with bounce emails
6.1. How to deal with soft bounces
6.1.1. Ask the other person to check their mailbox capacity
6.1.2. Check the email size
6.1.3. DNS errors should be checked by checking the sending domain
6.2. How to deal with hard bounces
6.2.1. Check your email address
7. What to do if you don't receive a bounce email
8. Measures against bounce mails using Arara's mail delivery system


What is a bounce email?
Bounce mail refers to "email that could not be delivered." For example, if a user registers as a member using an incorrect email address, an error will occur after the email is delivered because the address does not exist, and a bounce mail will be sent. There are various reasons why bounce mail is sent, such as the recipient being absent, the mailbox being full, or the destination server being down. If you continue to send emails to an address that has an error, they will be considered spam and there is a high possibility that the destination server will reject them.

In addition to being called bounce mail, it is also called "error mail," "undelivered mail," or "return mail."

You will receive a bounce message containing the following information:

The bounce date and time
Bounced mail server
Error Content




How do bounce emails work?
To understand bounce mail, you first need to understand how sent mail reaches the recipient. When you send an email from your computer, it is first delivered to the sender's mail server. The sender's mail server queries the DNS server to obtain the recipient's information in order to identify the recipient's mail server from the destination email address information. The email is then sent to the recipient's mail server.

After that, when the recipient uses email software to receive the email from the recipient's email server, delivery is complete. A bounce email is an error that occurs during this process. When an email is returned as a bounce email, the sender receives a notification that delivery failed.

I'm sure you've seen it before, but it comes back with the From header (sender address) set to "MAILER-DAEMON" and the Subject header set to "Delivery Status Notification (Failure / Delay)" or similar.