What Are Bounced Emails And How To Fix Them?

1. Bounced Email Definition And Meaning
2. 7 Common Reasons Why Emails Bounce
3. How Email Bounces Impact Sender Reputation
4. How To Fix And Prevent Bounced Emails
5. 5 Tools To Verify Email Addresses

Bounced Email Definition And Meaning

• Soft Bounces → Temporary issue. Might succeed on retry.
• Hard Bounces → Permanent issue. Never going through.

7 Common Reasons Why Emails Bounce

1. Non-Existent Email Address
2. Mailbox Full
3. Blocked Email
4. Email Server Issues
5. Content Filters
6. Authentication Problems
7. Too Many Emails At Once

1. Non-Existent Email Address

2. Mailbox Full

3. Blocked Email

4. Email Server Issues

5. Content Filters

6. Authentication Problems

7. Too Many Emails At Once

How Email Bounces Impact Sender Reputation

• Lower Deliverability: Your future emails are more likely to land in spam or be blocked entirely.

• Poor Sender Score: ISPs assign a reputation score to your domain and IP. Bounces drag that score down fast.

• Blacklisting Risk: Repeated hard bounces can trigger spam traps and get your domain/IP listed on blocklists like Spamhaus.

• Throttled Sending: If you’re seen as a risky sender, mailbox providers might limit how many emails they’ll accept from you—aka rate limiting.

How To Fix And Prevent Bounced Emails

1. Set Up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC
2. Remove Hard Bounces Immediately
3. Avoid Purchased Or Scraped Lists
4. Warm Up New Domains And IPs
5. Avoid Spam Trigger Words
6. Follow the Law
7. Use Email Verification Tools

1. Set Up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC

If you send emails from your domain, it’s important to authenticate your domain records.

These records allow email service providers to verify that your emails are actually coming from your domain, helping to prove that you’re the legitimate sender.

You can authenticate your email by verifying SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records.

1. Sender Policy Framework (SPF): SPF verifies that the IP address sending your email is authorized to do so by your domain.

It checks the sender’s IP against a list of approved IPs in your domain’s DNS record, confirming your identity and helping prevent unauthorized use of your domain.

By authenticating your domain, you’re signaling to email providers like Gmail or Microsoft that your emails are trustworthy, reducing their chances of being marked as spam.

You can use GoDaddy platform to verify your DNS records.

2. Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM): DKIM adds a digital signature to your emails, ensuring they aren’t altered during transmission.

This verification helps maintain the integrity of your emails and prevents them from being tampered with while en route to the recipient.

3. Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC): DMARC builds on the foundations of SPF and DKIM by requiring both for email delivery.

It also reports your email authentication status, helping you monitor and improve your email security.

4. Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI): BIMI allows you to display your brand’s logo next to your emails, making them instantly recognizable and enhancing your brand’s credibility.

This visual trust signal can increase recipient engagement and trust in your emails.

To protect your sender reputation, it’s important to monitor also these key metrics regularly:

• Open Rate: A low open rate suggests that your audience may not be engaged or that your sending reputation has been damaged.

• Click-Through Rate: If your click-through rate is low, it might indicate a need for better audience segmentation or clearer, more compelling calls-to-action (CTAs) in your emails.

• Hard Bounce Rate: A high hard bounce rate usually means your email list contains outdated or invalid addresses.

• Unsubscribe Rate: An elevated unsubscribe rate could signal that your content isn’t aligning with subscribers’ expectations or that your list is no longer fresh.

• Spam Complaint Rate: A high spam complaint rate is a red flag that your recipients weren’t anticipating your emails, which can severely harm your sending reputation.

You can find all these metrics in your CRM. So, make sure to track and improve them for your future emails.

2. Remove Hard Bounces Immediately

• Automatically suppress hard bounces in your email platform. Most tools—like Mailchimp, HubSpot, and Brevo—have automatic suppression lists. Make sure this setting is active.

• Monitor bounce reports after every campaign. Check the bounce type and reason (e.g., 550 5.1.1 – user doesn’t exist) and ensure the address is flagged or removed.

• Sync your CRM and email tools. If you’re using HubSpot or a similar CRM, make sure contacts marked as hard bounces are also marked inactive in your sales sequences or workflows.

3. Avoid Purchased Or Scraped Lists

These lists are filled with invalid and inactive addresses. Even if they “look legit”, they destroy your sender reputation.

If you don’t want to suffer later, you better start building high-quality email lists now.

It’s the number one success factor in email marketing.

Make sure you extract emails using scraping tools that offer GDPR-compliant and accurate data.

Collect contacts through legitimate sources like opt-in forms, sign-up pages, or other consent-based methods.

4. Warm Up New Domains And IPs

Start slow. Sudden volume spikes lead to soft bounces or throttling.

That’s why warming up your Gmail account is critical if you plan to send many emails, especially from a new or inactive account.

Using a tool like Mailreach, you can gradually increase the number of emails you send daily.

1. Go to your Mailreach and connect your email account.

2. Follow all the steps to set up your account if it’s a new email address.

Mailreach will guide you through all the steps of this process.

Ultimately, you’ll have warmed-up email lists ready to send emails without getting into spam and improve your overall deliverability.

This process helps to build your email sender reputation, as email providers see consistent, low-volume sending as a sign of legitimate activity.

5. Avoid Spam Trigger Words

Certain words and phrases are commonly associated with spam and junk mail.

This can trigger email filters to flag your messages.

These “spam trigger words” include terms like “free,” “guaranteed,” “act now,” and others that often appear in unwanted promotional emails.

Here is a list of spam trigger word lists by HubSpot.

To avoid having your emails filtered as spam, be mindful of your language and focus on creating clear, honest, and directly relevant content for your audience.

6. Follow the Law

Compliance with email marketing laws like CAN-SPAM (in the U.S.) and CASL (in Canada) is non-negotiable.

These laws require you to:

• Include a clear and easy-to-find unsubscribe link in your emails
• Refrain from using misleading subject lines
• Ensure that your email content is truthful

Following these legal guidelines helps protect your sender’s reputation and prevents potential legal issues, ensuring your emails land in the inbox rather than the spam folder.

7. Use Email Verification Tools

The email open rate indicates email deliverability, and your goal is to keep it high.

To maintain high deliverability rates, ensure that the email addresses on your list are valid and active.

You can verify your emails manually and with automation.

For example, on LinkedIn, you can go to anyone’s profile and check their contact information to verify their email.

Use automation tools like NeverBounce or ZeroBounce if you have hundreds of emails.

These tools can verify the validity of your email addresses, flagging those that are inactive, incorrect, or likely to bounce.

5 Tools To Verify Email Addresses

Email verification tools are the best way to save time when building email lists for your marketing and scale campaigns.

Here are 5 tools you can try:

1. Evaboot
2. ZeroBounce
3. Hunter
4. EmailListVerify
5. NeverBounce

1. Evaboot

Evaboot Chrome extension is a smart data scraper designed to export verified emails and up-to-date contact data from LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Evaboot is a perfect tool for those with a big LinkedIn network who want to mobilize those leads.

So, if you want to create lead lists from your network and enrich your lists with real-time email data, this is the right tool.

It provides you with ready-for-outreach Excel files in just one click.

This is a great tool if you do lead-scraping on LinkedIn or LinkedIn Sales Navigator and want to export the data and extract verified emails for those lists.

Its main features include:

• Find professional emails
• Verify emails
• Export leads from LinkedIn Sales Navigator
• Export company profiles
• Export LinkedIn profile URLs
• Clean the data (emojis, capital letters, typos…)
• Detect false positives in your search results

The final results are based on the search filters you used on LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

So whenever it sees a lead that doesn’t match your search requirements, the “Match Filter” will indicate “NO”.

It’s very easy to use:

1. Click the extension button on the top right of your Sales Navigator page.

2. It’ll redirect to the Evaboot dashboard, where you can launch the export.

Once the export is done, you can download the email lists with all the other lead information needed to personalize your outreach messages.

Another great thing about Evaboot is that it does not give you false emails.

If the address is risky or old, it will be excluded from the list.

This means you can import the exported file to a CRM or outreach software and launch your campaign without concern.

Evaboot’s pricing is credit-based.

The most basic plan starts at $9 for 100 credits.

With Evaboot, you don’t have to worry about the quality and legality of the data.

You’ll have GDPR-compliant and verified emails ready to exploit in your next outreach campaign.

2. ZeroBounce

ZeroBounce is an easy-to-use email verification tool with a user-friendly interface and high accuracy.

It’s a great starting point for those new to email verification.

The tool checks for invalid addresses, spam traps, and syntax errors to ensure your email list is clean and deliverable.

ZeroBounce provides email validation and an email finder API, which is available in 13 languages, including PHP, iOS, Scala, Javascript, and more.

Installing the verification API on your preferred system, platform, and website will allow you to validate emails automatically using your software or application.

Their pricing is built for businesses of all sizes.

They offer a free trial, and their prices are credit-based, with a price per credit of $0.009.

3. Hunter

Hunter.io is a leading email search engine specializing in discovering and verifying professional email addresses across the web.

Hunter finds and verifies emails via any company domain, company name, prospect name, Bulk email finder, API, Google Sheets Add-on, or Hunter plugin.

Hunter’s main features are:

• Finding professional email addresses associated with any domain
• Domain search to find all the publicly available email addresses associated with it
• Integrate Hunter.io with your CRM, such as HubSpot or Salesforce, to automate lead generation
• Perform bulk searches to find multiple email addresses at once
• Use the Hunter API to find emails
• Email Finder extension to find emails from the website you use

You can try Hunter.io for free, which offers 25 searches and 50 verifications per month. The Starter Plan starts at €49/month, including 50

4. EmailListVerify

EmailListVerify is an email list cleaning and verification tool that ensures the addresses on your list are valid, deliverable, and safe to send to.

This helps improve email deliverability, reduce bounce rates, and protect your sender’s reputation.

Key features include:

• Bulk email verification
• Syntax checking
• Domain and MX record validation
• Disposable and role-based email detection
• Spam trap and abusive email detection

The pricing is based on the number of emails you want to check, with options ranging from pay-as-you-go credits to monthly subscriptions.

5. NeverBounce

NeverBounce is an email verification and list-cleaning service that ensures your email lists are accurate and up-to-date.

Verifying email addresses in real-time and cleaning bulk lists helps reduce bounce rates and improve email deliverability, ensuring your emails reach their intended recipients.

Main Features:

• Real-time email verification
• Bulk email list cleaning
• Automated list cleaning via integrations
• Instant bounce analysis
• Seamless API for developers

NeverBounce offers a price-per-email pricing model. This means that you pay for the number of emails you verify.

This model lets you verify or clean as many emails as you want.

Conclusion

• Verify every email before you hit send using tools like Evaboot, ZeroBounce, or NeverBounce.
• Monitor bounce reports like a hawk.
• Authenticate your domain properly.
• Clean your list like it’s your job—because it is.

FAQs

What Does It Mean When An Email Is Bounced?

How To Fix A Bounced Email?

What Is It Called When An Email Bounces Back?

What Is The Difference Between Bounced And Blocked Emails?

What Is A Bounced Email Example?