Ever wonder why your perfect emails are bouncing back in Gmail? Many reasons might cause that. Either temporary or permanent bounces happen all the time. They are frustrating, disappointing, and, most importantly, damaging to your presence and activity in the channel, especially regarding the industry leader that tops the list of mail providers.
Hard and soft bounces are fairly common. According to cross-industry research, 2% to 5% is the typical benchmark, meaning no one is immune to them. However, although they are regular, they have bad repercussions for a company. For instance, they might cause wasted resources and investment or ruin the sender’s score and reputation.
To make matters worse, every ESP relies on its algorithms to accept or reject a digital newsletter. Companies must adopt strategies aligned with the mail provider’s unique policies to get through and ensure uninterrupted communication with users. Let’s dive into Gmail and its bounces to understand what causes them and how to minimize them.
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What Is Gmail Bounce?
Gmail bounce does not differ much from any other basic ESP bounce—it is the situation when the sender’s message is not delivered to the recipient’s inbox because it was rejected by the provider and returned to the origin contact for certain reasons. The latter could be temporary or permanent, making the bounce soft or hard.
Every such bounce, as well as a successful delivery, is represented as an SMTP code, a response the receiving server provides. It includes information about the rejection and its cause, which is important for troubleshooting.
For instance,
smtp;421 4.7.0 [x.xx.xx.xx] Our system has detected that this message is suspicious due to the very low reputation of the sending domain. To best protect our users from spam, the message has been blocked. Please visit https://support.google.com/mail/answer/188131 for more information.
Here is another example of a soft Gmail bounce:..