How Bounced Emails (Bouncebacks) Can Ruin Your Business

Before we proceed with this discussion, what is a bounceback or a bounced email?

Bounced email / Bounceback = something that you get when you send an email to someone but for some reason it is rejected by the server and it goes back to you with an error. Usually the bounceback contains your original message as well as a note on top with an explanation why your email was returned or rejected. You will receive this bounced email message usually within minutes of sending your email, or at least that same day.

Some reasons why emails bounce:

• the email address is no longer valid. The user has closed that account because he or she changed her email address. If her email address is related to her internet service provider, then it may have also closed when the user changed ISPs and no longer uses that company for her internet access.
• the email account may be temporarily unavailable. This happens when the user’s email server has gone down or experienced temporary network problems.
• the account’s inbox is too full. If the receiver’s mailbox is full, then your message bounces back. In this case, you can re-send your email message when the receive deletes some of his or her old email messages to make more room for additional emails to be delivered

So now we come to the question: how do bounced emails ruin your business? This question is specifically important for email addresses that are no longer valid because the acount no longer exists.

To maintain the health of your mailing list, you need to delete those email addresses that generate bouncebacks. Why waste your server bandwidth trying to send email messages to accounts that no longer exists? Cleaning up your mailing lists is also a good way to maintain a high-deliverability rate.

But here’s the kicker, especially if you have a lot of email addresses on your huge mailing list that bounces back. Did you know that if you continue to send email messages to accounts that are no longer valid, the ISPs that host those email addresses might label you as a SPAMMER? They assume you are sending unsolicited email to random accounts. As a result, they will block the email messages coming specifically from you (or your server) to any of the email accounts they host on their server. In other words, they will BLOCK you from sending any more email messages to any email account that they host. For example, if you have a mailing list for which you receive 100 bouncebacks from 500 of your subscribers with Yahoo email accounts, and you continue to send email messages to those 100 invalid accounts, Yahoo may label you or your server as a SPAMMER and hence block you from sending any more emails to the remaining 400 Yahoo addresses on your mailing list. Because of that, you’ve just lost 400 valid contacts from your mailing list. That is not good for your business.

As you can see, bounced emails can do some damage to your online business. To summarize, clean up your mailing list regularly. You’ve worked hard to build up your list. Don’t let it get ruined by bouncebacks!