Are you doing “the rebound”?

No, it’s not a new hip-hop dance.

A bounce, or bounce, is an email that is bounced back to you because it is undeliverable for some reason. You’ve probably gotten bounces in your own personal email program, when you send an email and then get a response that says it couldn’t be delivered.

However, these become more of a headache when publishing an e-zine. Sending emails to more people means more bounces. And too many bounces can get your emails blocked with certain Internet Service Providers, meaning a lot of your emails won’t reach your readers.

what you need to know

There are two types of email bounces:

HAS hard bounce is an email message that was bounced to you because the recipient address is invalid. A hard bounce can occur because the domain name does not exist, the recipient is unknown, or there is some kind of network problem on the recipient’s side.

HAS soft bounce is an email message that reaches the recipient’s mail server, but is bounced back before it reaches the recipient. One of the most common causes of a soft bounce is a full mailbox. This will happen A LOT with your subscribers who use free email services like Yahoo and HotMail, because they allow very little email storage.

What do you need to do

Ask your current listing service how they handle their bounces.

Some of them have a hands-off policy and do nothing. If so, ask them how you can get in yourself and see how many names are bouncing and who they are. You can then decide to keep them on your list or remove them.

One factor to consider here is your list server’s “retry” policy. I mean, how many times do they try to send your e-zine to soft bounce people? Some only try once, others try multiple times, waiting a few hours in between.

Sometimes you’ll also see some obviously misspelled email addresses (eg “nancy123@aolcom”, note the missing period) and you can correct them manually.

If your listserver is non-interactive, you’ll want to go in and view your bounce situation at least once a month to check things out and remove names if necessary.

The other extreme is list services that automatically remove people after a single bounce, which is not good because it could be caused by a temporary problem like a network outage. If this is your list server’s policy, find out if you can change it.

Then some list services take the middle way and automatically remove anyone who has had a certain number of bounces in a row. Ideally, you want them to wait longer on soft bounces to make sure the issue isn’t resolved in the next few issues you submit.

Often, you can tell the list server to unsubscribe from soft bounces after a specified time, for example, five bounces in a two-week period.

Whatever your case, be sure to monitor your bounces this month!

(c) 2003 Alexandria K. Brown