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.

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:

A soft bounce is considered a recognized email address and gets as far as the recipient's 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:

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, as well as the percentage and total number of emails that were bounced per each sequence stage under Email Performance.

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