Email Bounce Back Processing

When email campaigns are sent, some emails may ‘bounce back’ to the MantisMail server to indicate that the email could not be delivered.

There are two types of bounces that can occur. The first type is a ‘hard bounce’ which happens when the email address either no longer exists (ie. The account has been closed down) or the email address is invalid and cannot be delivered to at all.
The second type is a ‘soft bounce’ which happens when our server receives a response that the email account you are delivering to is full, the person is on holidays or some other temporary reason.

We understand that soft bounces are only temporary issues and therefore we just record the information about the bounce but do not actually mark the email account as bouncing as more than likely the next time you send to this email account, it will work fine.

However, in order to keep your lists clean, we automatically mark hard bouncing email addresses as ‘bouncing’. Once a contact is marked as bouncing, it will no longer receive future email campaigns and you should either delete the contact or update their email address to one that is working.
Apart from giving you a better idea of which email accounts in your contacts databases actually exist and work, it also gives you a better reputation with email servers around the world.

Many ISP’s and email servers now block emails from domains that continue to send to non existent (hard bounce) email accounts over and over again. By using MantisMail, we help protect you by ensuring that once an email address is hard bouncing, it will not be sent to again.

If you are receiving bouncing contacts, they will show up both in your statistics for specific campaigns (so you can see the percentage of contacts in your campaign that bounced) and your dash board will also alert you if and when any contacts start bouncing.

To delete or update bouncing contacts, simply go to the ‘Contacts’ menu and perform a search. In the search box is an option for ‘bounces’. This lets you choose if you want to show only bouncing contacts so you can then either delete them or go in and update their details.
If you view the details on a bouncing contact, more information about when the bounce occurred and the ‘reason’ given by their ISP as to why they are bouncing is shown.