About Bounces
Learn about bounces and how to maintain a healthy Mailchimp audience.
Get the job done with a pro
From training to full-service marketing, our community of partners can help you make things happen.
When an email cannot be delivered to an email server, it's called a bounce. The email server will generally provide a reason for the incident, and Mailchimp uses those reasons to determine how to treat that email address. We categorize bounces into two types: hard bounces and soft bounces.
In this article, you’ll learn about hard and soft bounces in Mailchimp.
Note
Beginning February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo will require a custom authentication and a published Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) record for anyone sending more than 5,000 emails to Gmail or Yahoo addresses in a 24-hour period. To prevent your emails from bouncing, we strongly recommend authenticating your email domain and configuring DMARC.
Also, if you use a free email service like Gmail or Yahoo for your From email address, we strongly recommend you switch to an email address from a private domain, like the one you use for work or for your website.
For more information about custom authentication and DMARC, check out About Email Domain Authentication.
Here are some things to know.
A hard bounce indicates a permanent reason an email can't be delivered. In most cases, hard bounced email addresses are cleaned from your audience automatically and immediately. Cleaned addresses will be excluded from all future sends. Here are some common reasons an email may hard bounce.
Note
There are occasionally cases in which valid email addresses will hard bounce.
Soft bounces typically indicate a temporary delivery issue and are handled differently than hard bounces by Mailchimp. When an email address soft bounces, it will immediately display as a soft bounce in the email report.
If an email address continues to soft bounce, the address will eventually be considered a hard bounce and cleaned from your audience. We'll allow 7 soft bounces for an email address with no subscriber activity and up to 15 soft bounces for contacts with previous subscriber activity before converting a soft bounce into a hard bounce. While there are many reasons an email address may soft bounce, these are some of the most common.
Now that you know what hard and soft bounces are, you can view bounce details in your email report. It's a good idea to keep a close eye on your bounce rate to be sure your emails are reaching your contacts. This can help you to abide by spam laws and avoid bounce suspensions.
About Email Reports
Causes of High Bounce Rates
Anti-Spam Requirements for Email
About Email Domain Authentication
About Bounce Suspension
Verify an Email Domain
Technical Support
Have a question?
Paid users can log in to access email and chat support.
Learn about bounces and how to maintain a healthy Mailchimp audience.
These cookies are strictly necessary to provide you with the services and features available through our site. Because these cookies are strictly necessary to deliver the site, you cannot refuse them without impacting how the site functions.
These cookies are used to enhance the functionality and performance of the site. They help us to customize the site and application for you in order to enhance your experience. While these cookies are not needed for a basic website experience, certain functionalities such as personalization and video would become unavailable.
These cookies are used to make advertising messages more relevant to you and your interests. They also perform functions like preventing the same ad from continuously reappearing, ensuring that ads are properly displayed, and in some cases selecting advertisements that are based on your interests.
These cookies collect information to help us understand how the site is being used or how effective our marketing campaigns are. They help us to know which pages are the most and least popular and to see how visitors move around the site. These cookies may be set by us or by third-party providers whose services we have added to our pages.