Bounced cold emails: what a bounce costs you, and who should pay for it

A bounce is an email that comes back undelivered, usually with an automatic message from the receiving mail server saying why. A hard bounce means the address or the whole domain does not exist or will not take mail, and it will fail every time. A soft bounce is a temporary failure, such as a full mailbox or a server that is down, and a later send may get through.

Hard bounces matter far more than their number suggests. Mail providers read them as a sign that a sender is using a guessed or bought list, and they judge the rest of your mail accordingly. That is also why you should not pay for a lead whose email bounces. In Leadistry you do not: if the first email to a lead bounces, the lead is credited back automatically, once.

Hard bounces and soft bounces

The difference decides what you do next:

• Hard bounce. The address does not exist, the domain does not exist, or the server refuses mail for that address for good. Never send to it again.
• Soft bounce. The mailbox is full, the server is busy or down, or the message was too large. It may be delivered later, but an address that soft-bounces again and again should be treated as a hard one.

The automatic reply usually says which it is, in the first line or in a short code. You do not need to read the codes to act sensibly: stop writing to any address that fails, and look at where it came from.

Why bounces hurt your domain

Gmail, Microsoft and the rest decide where your mail lands partly on how your sending behaves. A mailbox that sends to real people who read and answer builds trust. A mailbox that keeps hitting addresses that do not exist looks careless at best, and like a spammer working through a list at worst.

The cost lands on your good emails, not the bad ones. Once your reputation slips, even a well-written email to a real customer is more likely to be filed in spam. And because cold email usually goes from the same domain as your quotes and invoices, the damage reaches beyond prospecting.

A new mailbox is the most exposed. It has no history to balance a bad day, which is one reason every mailbox connected to Leadistry starts at 5 emails a day. How many cold emails you can send a day covers the ramp.

Where bounced cold emails come from

Almost every bounce in cold email traces back to how the address was found:

• Guessed addresses. firstname@company or firstname.lastname@company, built from a pattern rather than found. Some work, and the rest bounce.
• Old data. People leave, companies close, domains lapse. A list bought last year has been decaying ever since.
• Addresses that belong to someone else. The web designer's address in a website's footer, or a placeholder left on a template site, often at a domain that does accept mail.
• Typos, such as a misspelt mail provider, copied from a website or a form.
• Domains that do not accept mail at all, which a simple check would have caught.

What a check can prove, and what it cannot

Before an address reaches you, two questions can be answered without sending anything. Does it belong to this company? And does its domain accept mail, which is a check of the domain's mail records? Together they remove two common causes of bounces: dead domains, and addresses that were never the company's.

What no check can do is prove a single mailbox exists without sending to it. Anybody who says otherwise is selling you a certainty they do not have. That is why the fair arrangement is not a promise that nothing will bounce. It is a promise about who pays when something does. You can check an address yourself with our free email checker.

Who should pay for a bounced lead

Not you. A lead is only worth paying for if you can reach the company, and a first email that bounces proves you could not. So in Leadistry:

1. Every address is checked first. It belongs to the company, and its domain accepts mail. A company without one is held back and never charged.
2. A lead whose first email bounces is credited back automatically. The lead returns to your leads for the month, and the next morning's delivery can use it. A trial's lead goes back to the trial.
3. Once per lead. A lead is credited back once, and only for a lead you paid for.
4. Only the first email counts. If a follow-up bounces later, the first email arrived, so the lead did its job.

You can see all of it. The Emails box on the Desk says how many emails bounced this week and how many leads were credited back. On the Leads screen a bounced row says "Bounced" with "Lead credited back", and opening it links to the line in your leads history. Our accuracy page sets out the checks in full.

What happens after a bounce

A bounce ends that thread. The follow-ups queued for the address are cancelled, and it is not written to again. Nothing needs doing on your side.

If you see more than the odd bounce, look at the pattern rather than the addresses. Several from one agent can mean a trade where firms publish few addresses, and it may be worth narrowing the area or the kinds of business.

Keeping bounces low, with or without us

1. Never guess addresses. Use ones the company published.
2. Check the domain before the first send. A domain that does not accept mail is a certain bounce.
3. Retire old lists. Anything more than a few months old deserves a fresh check.
4. Start slowly from a new mailbox, a handful a day, so one bad batch cannot sink it.
5. Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC on your own domain. They do not stop bounces, but they stop real mail being treated as forged. The deliverability guide walks through them.

Start free with 25 leads and no card. If a first email to one of them bounces, that lead comes back to you.