Soft Bounce vs Hard Bounce: What's the Difference?
Understanding email bounce codes and when to remove a subscriber from your list.
Hard Bounce: Permanent Failure
A permanent failure means the email address literally does not exist or the domain is invalid. Action: Remove these addresses from your database immediately. Retrying them will only damage your reputation.
Soft Bounce: Temporary Failure
A temporary failure. The recipient's mailbox might be full (over quota), or their server is temporarily down. Action: You can retry these, but if an address soft-bounces more than 3 times in a month, it should be treated as a hard bounce.
Debugging: If you get a bounce for an address you know is real, use our SMTP Checker to see the exact error code from the receiving server.
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