Bounce and ESP Feedback Handling

A big part of maintaining your email reputation is processing bounces properly.

While most major ESPs give bounce replies on the wire during the SMTP session, there are some that send bounce messages via email. In order receive these emailed bounce messages, you must have the appropriate header included with your email so that recipients know where to reply with bounce information.

You must also process this bounce data and act accordingly. In addition, many ESPs will soft bounce your initial attempts at delivery. This is also called grey-listing or throttling. If you continue to send emails to bad addresses or you do not listen to ESPs feedback, you will get filtered and eventually your emails will just get dropped.

PUSHTech automatically processes bounce information and reacts accordingly. A good portion of PUSHTech’s email technology is devoted to the parsing of this feedback and adjusting your sending in accordance with this feedback so that you maintain a good reputation.

If we receive a hard bounce, we will stop sending to that address immediately and will not attempt future deliveries to that address. We will stop sending to an address after multiple soft bounces, according to the ESPs’ guidelines. It is possible to remove addresses from the flagged list in your control panel or through the API, in case it was a temporary issue.

Note: Always allow 24 hours for the reports to update in PUSHTech. During times of unusually high traffic, such as Black Friday, this can increase. 

If more than 24 hours have passed since you sent your campaign and you want feedback or context on your campaign deliverability results and performance, reach out directly to your customer success manager and CC customer.success@pushtech.com.