Troubleshoot Bounced Emails

Please take a look at the top 8 reasons why emails often bounce. These can help with understanding why your emails are bouncing & assist with determining a proper strategy.

1. Aggressive SPAM Filters
SPAM filters constantly improve their algorithms to filter out unwanted messages and spammers devise new ways to get past them. Also keep in mind that some industries experience consistently higher bounce rates than others.

2. Individual Server Administrators
Server administrators check every incoming email and assign it a SPAM score. SpamAssassin is a popular tool frequently used to identify unwanted messages by scanning and evaluating all the content in an email message. Descriptions of criteria that count against you...

"if you want to subscribe", "See for yourself", Subject of email is in all capitals, "Free Preview", Message is 0% to 10% HTML

3. Natural Database Decay Email lists continue to age. Businesses continue to change, grow, shrink & expand. Because of a natural list decay, a certain amount of email addresses will fail.

4. Temporary Un-deliverables
soft bounce occurs when the server rejects an email due to temporary conditions such as a full inbox, a connection issue or the size of the email is too large.

Most email services will attempt to resend messages that soft bounce. Hubspot for example, will attempt to resend emails that have soft bounced for up to 72 hours until the message is either successfully delivered or it fails permanently.

5. Invalid Addresses
hard bounce occurs when an e-mail message is returned to the sender because the recipient’s address is invalid. Spelling and typing mistakes occur frequently which can cause a bounce. It is important to document email information accurately.

6. Sender Reputation
A spam filter’s job is to rate how familiar or relevant you are with your recipients. Sender Reputation is the most important factor used to determine email acceptance by an ISP.

ISPs often use external companies to provide sender reputation data so that they can screen emails against it. Check your own domain reputation for free at SenderScore or McAfee’s TrustedSource.

Lucky for you, Clockwork has an A reputation!

7. Blacklisted IP Addresses
Spam filters check your sending IP against blacklisted IP ranges. Unfortunately, that means if anyone in your IP range is spamming, your legitimate messages can get trapped in filters as well.

For example, if one of the millions of users of Aweber is doing something spammy, it can temporarily affect the deliverability of other users. This is why email services work so hard to make sure their users operate within their terms of service.

Repeat offenders can end up on permanent blacklists. You can check your domain on Debouncer which monitors over 100 different blacklists.

8. Evolving Industry Standards
The list of what qualifies as “spammy” changes often.

DMARC, which stands for “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance”, is a technical specification created by a group of business and organizations that want to help reduce the potential for email-based abuse.

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