How does Mixmax handle bounces?

A bounce refers to an email whose delivery was rejected by your recipient's email server. There are many different reasons why a message might be rejected and these correlate to what we call 'hard bounces' and 'soft bounces'. You'll see bounced messages indicated in your reports and live feed with a red arrow.

What is a hard bounce?

A hard bounce indicates a permanent reason your email cannot be delivered and future attempts to email this address will result in additional bounces. Some causes for hard bounces include: 

• email address does not exist 
• domain does not exist
• typos in the email address
• email address has changed

What is a soft bounce?

A soft bounce is considered a recognized email address and gets as far as the recipients server before it is bounced back or undelivered. In many instances, a soft bounce will be retried after a period of time. If you receive a bounced email notification, it will most likely indicate if delivery will be reattempted. Soft bounces can occur for many reasons, some of which include: 

• your recipient's mailbox is full 
• the mail server is down 
• the mail server processing a high volume of messages
• the message is too large

How are bounces handled for sequences?

For all hard bounces, Mixmax will automatically exit the email address from the sequence so you don't have to worry about future attempted deliveries. The Insights tab in the sequence will indicate the percentage and total number of emails that were bounced in your current sequence.

For soft bounces, Mixmax will continue to deliver future stages and the recipients will not be exited from the sequence. 

In Mixmax, only hard bounces are indicated in your live feed and reports.