The goal of sending an email on Dripify is simple but crucial. It makes the email appear in your lead's inbox. However, sometimes, emails don’t reach this point. This article explains what happens when they don’t — what a bounce is, why it happens, and what you can do to keep your email deliverability healthy.
What Is a Bounced Email?
A bounced email is a message that could not be delivered to the recipient and was returned to the sender. Bounces are reported by the receiving mail server and fall into two categories.
Hard bounce — a permanent failure. The address does not exist, the domain is unknown, or the recipient’s server has permanently rejected delivery. There is no point of retrying. These leads should be removed from your sequences and lead lists immediately.
Soft bounce — a temporary failure. The mailbox is full, the server is temporary down, or the message is too long. The delivery may succeed if you retry it later.
What Is a Delivered Email?
A delivered email is the one that has been accepted by the recipient’s mail server. The delivery does not guarantee that the email has landed in the inbox — it could still be filtered to spam — but it confirms that the message has not been rejected outright. High delivery rates reflect healthy sender reputation and a clean quality list.
What Causes Emails to Bounce?
The most common causes include:
Email address is mistyped, inactive, or no longer exists
Recipient’s mailbox is full and cannot accept new messages
Recipient’s mail server is temporarily down or rejecting connections
Your sending domain or IP address is blocked or blacklisted
The message is flagged as spam due to content or authentication policy
The email exceeds size or attachment limits set by the receiving server
DNS or MX record misconfiguration on the recipient’s domain
How Bounced Emails Affect Deliverability
Bounces are not just a failed email sending — they have a compounding effect on your ability to reach anyone in the future.
High bounce rates signal poor list quality to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and damage your sender reputation score.
Damaged sender reputation causes harm to future emails — even to valid addresses — to be filtered into spam or entirely blocked.
Repeated bounces can trigger blacklisting of your sending IP or domain, causing widespread delivery failures across campaigns.
Bounces reduce open/click rates, which ISPs use to evaluate the email sending quality.
ISPs interpret a high volume of bounces as evidence of purchased, outdated, or unverified lists — all of which they penalize.
What Is a Good Email Bounce Rate?
Regardless of your industry, try to keep your bounce rate at 2% or lower. If it increases to 2-5%, most likely your list needs some cleaning. Anything above 5% is where things get risky — email providers may start considering your domain untrustworthy, and your emails can end up in spam or stop getting delivered altogether.
💡 Dripify monitors your bounce rate and shows a warning when it approaches the 2% threshold.
How to Avoid Bounced Emails
1. Verify your email list before importing
Use an email verification tool to validate addresses before adding them to Dripify sequences. Remove any addresses flagged as invalid, disposable, or risky.
2. Keep your list current
Email addresses go outdated. People change jobs, domains expire, and inboxes get abandoned. Regularly scrub your list and remove addresses that haven’t engaged for 6–12 months.
3. Avoid sending emails to bounced addresses
Bounced leads should be removed from your list as soon as bounces occur. If you continue sending emails to the bounced addresses, ISPs are informed that your lead list hygiene is not maintained.
💡 When Dripify detects that an email address has bounced, this lead will automatically skip all the following email steps in the campaign. Dripify will still perform LinkedIn steps for the lead.
4. Avoid purchased or scraped lists
Lists acquired from third-party vendors or scraped from the web are typically full of invalid, role-based, or spam-trap addresses. These are among the fastest ways to spike your bounce rate and damage your sender reputation.
5. Warm up new sending domains
If you’re starting with a new domain or IP address, ramp up your send volume gradually. Sending large volumes from a cold domain triggers spam filters and raises bounce rates.
6. Authenticate your sending domain
Make sure your domain has valid SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records configured. Missing or incorrect authentication settings can cause legitimate emails to be rejected outright.
7. Monitor and act on Dripify warnings
When Dripify flags a high bounce rate, pause the affected sequence, revise your lead list and remove the problem email before resuming the sequence. Ignoring warning notifications accumulates reputation damage.
Ultimately, the best way to protect your email deliverability is simple: keep your lead list clean, verify your email addresses, and make sure your sending domain is properly authenticated.