Email types & metrics
Bounce rate
The share of sent emails that couldn’t be delivered. A high hard-bounce rate is one of the fastest ways to damage your sender reputation.
How to calculate it
Bounce rate is bounced emails divided by emails sent. Track hard and soft bounces separately: soft bounces are usually temporary, while hard bounces point to bad addresses on your list.
What’s a good bounce rate?
Keep hard bounces under 2%, and ideally under 1%. A sudden jump usually means an old or unvalidated list was imported, or a signup form is collecting junk addresses.
Bounce rate in MailCraft
MailCraft tracks your bounce rate over a rolling window as part of your reputation status, and suppresses every hard-bounced address automatically so it can’t bounce twice.
Let MailCraft handle the details
Authentication, bounces, complaints and suppression are built in. Start free with 3,000 emails a month, no credit card required.
Start freeRelated terms
Full glossarySending & delivery events
Hard bounce
A permanent delivery failure — the address or domain doesn’t exist. Hard bounces should be suppressed immediately and never retried.
Sending & delivery events
Soft bounce
A temporary delivery failure — a full mailbox or a momentarily unreachable server. Soft bounces are worth retrying a few times before giving up.
Deliverability
List hygiene
The ongoing work of keeping your contact list accurate and engaged: removing invalid addresses, bounces and long-inactive contacts so you only send to people who can and want to receive your mail.