Bounces and Complaints
Sending a message is not the end of it. Providers report back what happened, and that feedback is ingested automatically.
Where to find it
Architect Panel → Commercial:
- Campaign Manager — campaign results
Architect Panel → Activity:
- E-mail Log — the individual message and its result
Architect Panel → Integration & Connections:
- E-mail Accounts — the sending account feedback arrives for
Hard and soft bounces
- A hard bounce is permanent — the address does not exist, or the domain does not. It will never succeed, and the address is suppressed.
- A soft bounce is temporary — a full mailbox, a server unavailable, a message too large. It may well succeed later.
Treating them the same is the mistake in both directions: suppressing on a soft bounce loses contacts unnecessarily, and retrying a hard bounce damages your reputation.
Complaints
A complaint means the recipient marked your message as spam. It is the most serious signal there is — mail providers weight it heavily, and a complaint rate above a fraction of a percent will start affecting delivery for your whole list.
Complaints result in suppression, immediately and correctly.
Watch the rates, not the counts
A hundred bounces from a list of fifty thousand is unremarkable. A hundred from a list of five hundred is a serious problem. Track both as proportions and watch the trend across campaigns.
What a rising bounce rate means
Usually that your data is ageing — people change jobs and addresses stop working. It can also mean a segment is picking up records it should not, such as old imports or test data.
Either way it is a prompt to clean the list rather than to keep sending.
What a rising complaint rate means
Something about the messages, in roughly this order of likelihood:
- People do not remember opting in, usually because it was too long ago.
- You are sending too often.
- The content is not what they expected when they signed up.
- The unsubscribe link is hard to find, so complaining is easier.
Feedback arrives asynchronously
Bounces and complaints come back over minutes to hours after sending, so a campaign that looks clean an hour after finishing may not be. Review results a day later rather than immediately.
Clean before a big campaign
Sending to a stale list is how reputations are damaged. Before a large or important campaign, exclude addresses that have not engaged in a long time — the messages were unlikely to be read, and the bounces and complaints they generate affect everything else you send.
Do not send to purchased lists
Worth stating plainly. They generate complaints and bounces at rates that will damage your sending reputation for months, and in most jurisdictions the sending is unlawful. No campaign result is worth it.
Worked example
A monthly newsletter runs at about 0.3% bounces and near-zero complaints. One month bounces jump to 4%, which traces to a segment change that had pulled in a three-year-old imported list. The segment is corrected, the dead addresses are left suppressed, and the following month returns to normal.
Recommendations
- Distinguish hard from soft bounces.
- Track rates as proportions, and watch the trend.
- Review results a day after sending, not immediately.
- Clean the list before a large campaign.