You may already be familiar with the concept of deliverability rate. Bounce rates reflect the opposite: while deliverability rates compares the number of the emails that reached an inbox with the number of emails sent, bounce rates compare the number of sent emails and the ones that did not reach a recipient. By definition, then, an email's bounce rate reflects the number of emails rejected by the receiving server.

In the reports from your newsletter send outs you can see how many email messages that have bounced. A bounced email is an email that for some reason could not be delivered to the recipient.

Bounces can be divided into different categories:

Hard bounces are the ones to look out for!
A hard bounce is typically due to the e-mail address not being valid. The e-mail address might be misspelled or non-existing or the email account might also have been closed.
If a hard bounce happens three (3) times for the same recipient, APSIS Pro will automatically unsubscribe and place the recipient in the Opt-Out-All.
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A soft bounce means that the e-mail address does exist, though the recipient's inbox might be full and can therefore not receive any e-mails.
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This type of bounce might be due to a temporary problem at the recipients e-mail server. The server might not have been available at the time of the sending, it might be temporarily down, overloaded etc.

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Other bounces mean that the bounce message cannot be placed in a specific category. Because there is no general standard for bounce errors, there are thousands of different bounce strings in different languages. We continuously work on refining and classifying bounce messages, but it is not possible to do so for all of them.

Monitoring bounce rates and spam complaints is essential when sending emails to APSIS Pro recipients. After your email is sent, you can review bounce details by checking the Report from your email send out periodically over the next 2–3 days.

Of course, preventing bounces is just as important as taking measures after noticing a high bounce rate. A bounce rate of less than 5% is considered normal, and as long as you are actively and periodically taking steps to prevent bounces, there is no need to worry.

However, if your bounce rates are...

Here is what you can do to help prevent bounces.

Spam or spamming refers to the action of sending bulk email messages for marketing or advertising purposes without the recipients' request or consent. Spam complaints in your Reports reflects only the number of recipients who reported an Email as spam.

Thus, this number does not reflect the full number of emails that landed in a spam or junk folder. The reason that emails sometimes arrive to a spam or junk folder is usually previous spam complaints, technical reasons and the reputation of the sender. Your sender reputation can be greatly affected by consistently sending to spam traps.

Spam traps are email addresses created to identify spam. Since they do not belong to a real individual, sending to a spam trap email address means that you obtained the address without consent.

Spam traps can be tricky to deal with, but sending to them greatly increases your chances of getting emails stuck in a spam or junk folder. There are three types of spam traps:

As long as you maintain a steady sending schedule, steady frequency and a good data hygiene - spam complaints should stay low.

However, you might want to ensure:

With authentication in place and knowledge about how to keep deliverability high, you minimise risk for spam complaints.