What is the difference between hard and soft bounce email?

What is the difference between hard and soft bounce email?

A soft bounce in email marketing refers to an email that gets as far as your recipient’s mail server but bounces back undelivered before it gets into the inbox.
A bounce that can be classified as temporary indicates that while the delivery of this current message was unsuccessful, you may be able to deliver another email to that address at a later date. It could be bouncing because:

  • You have been blocked by the recipient’s inbox provider because too many users have marked your emails as spam.
  • You have been blocked for being on a blocklist
  • The recipient’s mailbox is full
  • The email account has been temporarily suspended
  • Of an unforeseen error or outage at the receiving mail server

A hard bounce is an email that couldn’t be delivered for permanent reasons. Maybe the email’s a fake address, maybe the email domain isn’t a real domain, or maybe the email recipient’s server won’t accept emails.
A permanent bounce may be the result of an unknown user error, which is caused when an email address:

  • Is invalid because it doesn’t exist
  • Has been deactivated, such as when someone leaves a company or abandons a free email account
  • Contains a typo that made it invalid (i.e., typing @gmial.com instead of @gmail.com)