Verified email bounces

Learn more about the different causes of verified email bounces.

When an email to one of your contacts bounces, don't fret. Interseller automatically tracks bounces and helps guard against this as much as we can. 

Bounced emails don't necessarily mean that the email address is invalid. There are a lot of other reasons why a verified email could have bounced so we've highlighted some of examples below:

Bounced emails to the same organization

Even though an email looks valid, there's a very slight chance (0.5%) that a verified email will bounce, especially when you email the same organization. This occurs because we're not able to run validations with organizations that have multiple layers of email servers.

Bounced emails from email provider

Sometimes you can also get a bounce from your own email provider. In this case, your email provider is throttling the number of emails you can send within a certain timeframe. Interseller automatically pauses messages, but may not in certain conditions.

It's best to check with your email provider on what the throttle limit is, especially if you're running multiple active campaigns with large sets of contacts. 

Bounced email notifications appearing in your Spam folder and not in the same email thread

If you're seeing a bounced status for contacts in your sequence, but not seeing the bounced notification in the same email thread, it's likely in your Spam folder.

Sometimes the bounced notification won't appear in the same email thread and will be sent as a separate email so be sure to check your Spam folder to see if it may have landed there.

Organization enforced rules

In some cases, the employee must reach out to you first before you can communicate with them via email. This is to help prevent their employees against phishing attacks, but is also an unfortunate reason an email can bounce back.

This is very common with Fortune 500 companies and large enterprises.

You've been blocked by the organization

This happens very rarely. However, if the receiving organization reports you to their IT department, there's a high chance they may add you to their company's block list. If that happens, a bounce will occur.

There may be a specific error code mentioned in the email notifying you the message was blocked so you can learn more about why the message wasn't delivered.

Your email reputation and copy

Your email reputation and copy has a significant effect on where your emails land.

To ensure your emails are landing in the inbox, it's important to write good email copy and avoid messaging risky or invalid email addresses, which can result in bounced emails.

If you consistently message contacts that are marked as invalid and they come back bounced, this can negatively affect on your email reputation over time and cause email services to block your messages.

For more information, check out our guide here on how to improve your email deliverability.

Your contact left their company

Sometimes you may not email a contact right away after they've been added into your sequence. It's possible within the timeframe of being added and messaged in a sequence, they could have left the company and their email address is no longer valid.

We estimate that about 90% of email bounces are because the address no longer exists.

Frequently asked questions

What is a verified bounce?

Verified bounces mean that the email address you have for a contact is valid, but we couldn't deliver your email to their inbox. It's a verified bounce since it shows that the email address is valid (indicated by the check mark), however the contact's status shows that the email bounced.

Here are a few examples of why this could happen:

1. The company your contact belongs to has email server rules in place that require the contact to email you first.
2. The contact you're trying to reach left the job in the timeframe in which you looked up their email and messaged them. This means their email address may no longer exist in the company's email system.

What is considered a high bounce rate?

We consider 5% or higher to be a high bounce rate and something that should be investigated further.

Is there a way to know why an email bounced?

Unfortunately, there's not much information provided by an email service to tell us why the email bounced but the information above should give you a general idea.

You can try reading the contents of the bounced message in your inbox, but it's usually generic and not much context is provided to specify an exact reason.

Why did my first email reach the contact but my follow-ups bounced?

The most common reason for this would be that the contact left their company or they may be using Outlook. Outlook has the option for users to completely block a person from sending them messages.

Some other very rare cases may be that the person's IT team blocked your emails completely or the companies server rules or spam filters changed.

If I update a contact's bounced email to a new email address, will the bounced email be removed from my sequence?

The bounced email address will remain in your sequence for statistics and data purposes, but you can remove the bounced email if you would like.