Tools change status and confuse those who only send to valid emails
VALID EMAILS: You have validated your emails and yet you still have a high rate of hard bounces in your email marketing tool, even though you only send valid emails. Eventually, it even blocked your sending because of this.
This raises doubts about the quality of the email validation you used, after all, a valid email can’t be hard bounce, can it? But it’s not as simple as it sounds and you need to keep an eye on market changes and updates to email marketing tools.
What’s next? Did the email validation work or not?
The answer is: Yes, emails classified as valid emails are indeed a valid email and able to receive messages. But your email marketing tool may be classifying that email as hard bounce because of previous blocks you’ve experienced, meaning that your reputation isn’t letting your messages reach the recipient.
It should be noted: the email marketing market is constantly evolving and new concepts are emerging all the time.
And how does that work now?
Among the concepts that have had their meaning changed recently are hard bounces, or permanent errors.
Previously, this status concerned only those emails that were invalid, i.e. unable to receive messages because they simply didn’t exist. Providers’ responses included, for example:
- Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable
- <domain> does not accept mail (see rfc1846)
Now, with deliverability and quality of results in mind, many email marketing companies are classifying a valid email as a hard bounce. But why would they do that?
The answer is simple: now, emails that were previously classified as soft bounces, due to blocks, have their status changed to hard bounce, so that the sender no longer tries to send emails to the same blocked address. This aims to reduce the negative impact of new delivery attempts that could damage the sender’s reputation.
Therefore, emails whose return from the provider is, for example, that of the messages below (which would previously have been classified as soft bounces or temporary errors), will be considered hard bounces in most email marketing tools:
- 5.7.1 : Client host rejected: Messages from your IP are temporary blocked.
- 5.7.1 Message rejected as spam by Content Filtering
See what the sending companies and organizations themselves say about hard bounce:
RD Station: “Hard Bounce: The classification of leads as Hard Bounces occurs for three possible reasons: the lead’s email address doesn’t exist, the lead is repeatedly classified as Soft Bounce or the lead’s email server blocks their emails from being received. Hard Bounce is therefore a permanent status that invalidates a lead in RD Station.”
Mailchimp: “Valid emails can (be classified as) Hard Bounce for many reasons. (…) Reasons why Valid Emails are bounces: blocked by firewall or filters.” (Read the full article here)
Return Path: “Hard Bounce: a warning that an email was not delivered to the intended recipient because of a permanent fault; for example, an invalid address (unknown user), or a rejection due to anti-spam filters (…)” (Read in full here)
Hubspot: “Hard Bounce are errors that indicate that the contact is ineligible to receive emails (…) Hubspot will automatically block these contacts if they: (…) were previously marked as spam; (…) email rejected by anti-spam filter; blocked due to recipient policies” (Read in full here)
Campaign Monitor: “For example, the following are all hard bounce messages: unknown user, bounced address (…)” (Read the full text here))
Benchmarkemail: “A ‘hard bounce’ indicates a permanent failure due to a non-existent address or a blocking condition by the recipient.” (Read in full here)
Stay tuned! Hard Bounce and invalid email are no longer the same thing.
You therefore need to observe and understand these new market changes. Your email validator is fundamentally about whether or not there are valid email addresses. But sending capacity will also be related to the management of your email marketing tool. So stay tuned and always read your reports carefully!
Email validation is important because it removes emails that are invalid and contribute to blockages, which will also end up affecting your valid emails and your reputation. So don’t neglect your database management, eh?