 A bounced e-mail is one that never arrives in the recipient's inbox and is sent back, or bounced back, to the sender with an error message that indicates to the sender that the e-mail was never successfully transmitted.
Hard Bounce: an e-mail that has bounced back to the sender undelivered without having been accepted by the recipient's mail server.
1. The recipient's server has predetermined that it is not accepting e-mails from the sender's address (for example, if it has blocked the address for anti-spamming purposes), the server will reject the message and it will subsequently bounce back to the sender.
2. The mail server on the recipient's end is busy and cannot handle the request at that time.
Soft Bounce: Once the e-mail has been accepted by the recipient's mail server there are still ways for the message to be rejected.
1. The mail server has to determine if the recipient (for example, webmaster@example.com) actually exists within its system and if that recipient is allowed to accept e-mails. If the recipient's address does not exist on the mail server, then the message will be rejected because there is no one to deliver the message to.
2. The sender misspells the recipient's address (for example, eebmaster@example.com) then the system will recognize this as a nonexistent address and bounce the message back.
3. The recipient exists but does not have enough disk space to accept the message (i.e., if his e-mail application is filled to storage capacity) then the message will bounce back to the sender.
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What is Email Bounce?