How Is the Bounce Count Higher than the Threshold?

When viewing your report on bounces from your Marketing Adviser or Social Media Marketing Adviser, you may notice that the bounce count for an email is much higher than your bounce count threshold.

But wait, what is a bounce count threshold?

When setting up your email list, a threshold is set.  This is a number of how many bounces needed before we automatically opt-out an email from future mailings. Once that number is met, or exceeded, that email address is opted-out from future mailings.

How can a bounce count go higher than the threshold without being opted-out automatically?

There are two types of bounces that can occur.  There are soft bounces, which is a normal failure to deliver a newsletter.  This can happen when an email  account is full, not currently available, etc. This increases the bounce count by "1" point.

The second is a 'hardfail' bounce, which occurs when the email is rejected by the user or when the email address is bad (i.e., no longer in use, invalid, etc.)  This will increase the bounce count by "10" point.

So, how can the bounce count threshold be passed?

With one 'hardfail' bounce, the threshold count could be over, depending on where the bounce count threshold was set.  This will effectively opt-out bad email addresses, or rejected emails, so no additional newsletters will be sent; automatically cleaning up your mailing list.

Note: We receive bounce or successful delivery notifications for each email sent after each round of newsletter deliveries.  Sometimes, a recipient's mail server will be set up to reply to our client's email address, at a later time, saying that the email was actually not delivered.  We do not take this into account when calculating bounce counts as we cannot automatically process messages or reports sent to alternate email servers.