When you send an email campaign, some messages don't reach the inbox. The mail server on the other end rejects them and the email "bounces" back. Not all bounces are the same. Some are permanent and some are temporary, and the difference changes how Raise More treats the address and what you should do about it.
This article explains what hard and soft bounces are, how Raise More classifies and handles them, what you'll see in your campaign report, and how to keep your sending healthy.
Hard bounce vs. soft bounce
A hard bounce is a permanent delivery failure. The receiving server is saying the email can never be delivered to that address, no matter how many times you try. Hard bounces usually mean the address is invalid or the domain doesn't exist.
Common causes of a hard bounce:
The email address doesn't exist (a typo, or the person closed the account)
The domain doesn't exist or has no mail server (for example, a misspelled
@gmial.com)The receiving server has permanently rejected the address
A soft bounce is a temporary delivery failure. The address is real, but something is preventing delivery right now. Given time, the message might go through on a later send.
Common causes of a soft bounce:
The recipient's mailbox is full
The receiving mail server is down or temporarily unavailable
The message is too large for the recipient's mailbox
The server is deferring delivery and asking the sender to try again later
The receiving server flagged the message on content or sender reputation grounds
The short version: a hard bounce means "this will never work," and a soft bounce means "this didn't work right now."
How Raise More classifies a bounce
When a message bounces, the email provider sends Raise More the bounce details. Raise More reads those details and sorts every bounce into one of four types:
Hard. A permanent failure, such as an invalid recipient or a nonexistent domain. The address is bad and won't get better.
Content/reputation. A temporary failure where the receiving server pushed back on the message content or the sender's reputation (for example, the message looked like spam or hit a sending policy).
Temporary. A temporary failure with no content or reputation signal, such as a full mailbox or a server that's briefly unavailable.
Unknown. The provider didn't give enough detail to classify the bounce confidently.
Content/reputation, temporary, and unknown are all treated as soft bounces. Hard is the only permanent category.
What Raise More does automatically
Raise More watches every campaign for bounce notifications and acts on them so you don't have to manage a suppression list by hand.
Hard bounces are suppressed right away. When an address hard bounces, Raise More marks it so it won't receive future sends from your organization. There's no point retrying a permanently bad address, and continuing to mail it damages your sending reputation.
Single soft bounces are not suppressed. A soft bounce is treated as temporary, and the address stays eligible for future sends.
Repeated soft bounces are suppressed. If an address soft bounces five or more times in a row without a successful delivery, open, or click in between, Raise More treats that pattern as a real problem and suppresses the address the same way it would a hard bounce. An address that keeps failing is, for practical purposes, undeliverable. The count resets whenever the address successfully receives, opens, or clicks one of your emails.
Suppression happens at send time
Raise More does not keep a separate "do not email" list that you maintain. Instead, every time a campaign goes out, it checks each recipient against the reasons an address may have been removed and drops anyone who:
previously hard bounced
has a history of repeated soft bounces
unsubscribed
filed a spam complaint
Those recipients are removed before the message is ever sent. This check runs across your whole organization, so once an address is suppressed for any of these reasons it stays suppressed on every future campaign until something changes (see the FAQ below).
What you'll see in your campaign report
After a campaign sends, the campaign page shows a Provider bounces count. When there are bounces, it breaks them down by the four classifications:
Hard
Content/reputation
Temporary
Unknown
This lets you see at a glance whether your bounces are permanent address problems (Hard) or temporary or reputation-related issues (the other three). A campaign that's mostly Hard bounces points to list-quality problems. A campaign with a lot of Content/reputation bounces points to a deliverability or sending-reputation issue worth investigating.
Why bounces matter for deliverability
Mailbox providers like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo watch how senders behave. A sender who repeatedly emails addresses that bounce looks like a spammer, because spammers blast large lists of unverified addresses. A high bounce rate signals that you aren't keeping your list clean.
The consequences add up:
Your sender reputation drops. That's the score providers use to decide whether your mail reaches the inbox or the spam folder.
More of your good messages get filtered to spam, even for valid recipients.
In severe cases, providers throttle or block your sending entirely.
This is why suppression isn't just housekeeping. Every bounced address you stop mailing protects the deliverability of the messages your real donors and supporters want to receive. It also keeps your sending in line with anti-spam rules, which require you to stop mailing addresses that have bounced or unsubscribed.
What you should do
Raise More handles suppression automatically, but you still play a role in keeping your list healthy:
Clean your list before you send. Fix obvious typos in email domains and remove addresses you know are dead. The cleaner your list goes in, the fewer bounces come out.
Import good data. Accuracy at the source prevents bounces later. Avoid bulk-importing old or unverified lists.
Don't re-add hard-bounced addresses. If an address was suppressed for a hard bounce, re-importing it doesn't fix the underlying problem. The address is still bad, and Raise More will keep filtering it out.
Watch your bounce numbers over time. A rising bounce rate, or a growing share of Content/reputation bounces, is an early warning that your list quality or sending reputation is slipping.
FAQ
Will a suppressed address ever get email from me again?
It depends on why it was suppressed. Hard bounces and spam complaints stay blocked. Addresses that unsubscribed or were suppressed for repeated soft bounces can be restored through your organization's public resubscribe link, which the recipient uses to opt back in themselves. The resubscribe link is available from your email campaigns page.
One of my contacts soft bounced once. Are they blocked?
No. A single soft bounce is treated as temporary, and the address stays eligible for future sends. Only five or more soft bounces in a row, with no successful delivery in between, lead to suppression.
What's the difference between the Content/reputation, Temporary, and Unknown bounce types?
They're all soft bounces, but they tell you different things. Content/reputation means the receiving server objected to the message content or your sending reputation. Temporary means a transient issue like a full mailbox. Unknown means the provider didn't give enough detail to tell. A high Content/reputation count is the one to take seriously, because it points to a deliverability problem rather than a single bad address.
Can I force-send to an address that bounced?
No. The send-time suppression check is built to prevent it, and re-mailing a known-bad or suppressed address hurts your deliverability and can put you out of compliance with anti-spam law.
A whole batch of my emails bounced. What happened?
A large bounce spike usually points to a list problem (an old or purchased list, or a bad import) or a sending-domain or reputation issue. Check the bounce breakdown on the campaign report: mostly Hard bounces points to list quality, while a lot of Content/reputation bounces points to deliverability. Review the source of those contacts and consider cleaning your list before your next send. If you're seeing a high Content/reputation rate and aren't sure why, reach out to support.
Do bounces affect my unsubscribe and spam-complaint handling?
They're handled together. Raise More suppresses addresses that hard bounced, repeatedly soft bounced, unsubscribed, or filed a spam complaint using the same send-time check, so all of these reasons keep an address off your future campaigns.