When Overloop sends an email that can’t reach its recipient, that is called a bounce. Bounces are important to understand because they affect your email deliverability, campaign performance, and sender reputation.
What Is a Bounce?
A bounce means your email was rejected or could not be delivered by the recipient’s email server. There are two main types:
Hard Bounce: A permanent failure due to reasons like an invalid email address or domain. These emails will never be delivered.
Soft Bounce: A temporary issue such as full inbox, server downtime, or a message that’s too large. These may be retried and succeed later.
Common Causes of Hard vs Soft Bounces
Bounce Type | Common Causes |
Hard Bounce | Invalid email address; non-existent domain; recipient server blocking emails. |
Soft Bounce | Mailbox full; server temporarily down; email too large; timeout or temporary server issue. |
Why Bounces Matter
Too many hard bounces can damage your sender reputation and cause your emails to be blocked or sent to spam.
Soft bounces may resolve themselves, but if they occur repeatedly with the same recipient, that address may need cleanup.
Maintaining low bounce rates helps your campaigns perform better and ensures higher inbox placement.
How to Lower Your Bounce Rate
You can never completely eliminate bounces, but you can significantly reduce them and improve your overall deliverability. Deliverability is key to making sure your emails land in your prospects’ inboxes.
Here are some best practices:
If you’re an account administrator, configure a CNAME for click tracking. This ensures you’re not sharing a common tracking domain whose reputation may have been damaged by other users.
Configuring your DKIM and SPF records proves you’re the legitimate sender of your emails. This helps receiving servers trust your messages and reduces the risk of them bouncing or landing in spam.
In Settings > Bounces & Out-of-office Replies, you can choose to automatically add prospects to your exclusion list when their emails hard-bounce or soft-bounce. This prevents sending to invalid addresses again and keeps your list clean.
Note: By default, prospects with hard bounces are automatically excluded from future sends. You can also enable soft-bounce exclusions if desired.