What would you do if the email failed to deliver a few minutes before your deadline?

The situation above describes the chaos of bounced emails.

What Is a Bounced Email?

A man sending email on PC

When yousend an emailthat does not deliver, it is called an email bounce.

Usually, there is an email bounce-back message to notify you.

In most cases, they also inform you of the cause of the email bounce.

Email address structure

There are two types of email bouncessoft bounce and hard bounce.

Lets examine what they mean.

Soft Bounce

Soft bounces are undelivered emails due to temporary causes.

A screenshot of an email failure notice

These types of bounces are less serious when compared to hard bounces.

Often, they dont require any action from you to be resolved.

They automatically sort themselves out once the issue causing it has been resolved.

Email Delivery Failure

Hard Bounce

When an email fails to deliver permanently, it is classified as a hard bounce.

Causes of hard bounces include a misspelled email address, a non-existent email ID, and a crashed server.

Here are some possible reasons an email may bounce:

1.

A screenshot of an email failure notice

In these cases, you won’t be able to send an email to the address.

Usually, the server is overloaded or unavailable due to maintenance.

If you receive this notification repeatedly, the email server may have shut down.

Email Size

Another reason your email might bounce is that its size is too large.

This is common when an email has attachments.

For example, Gmail doesnt send emails with attachments larger than 25MB.

Most popular email providers have similar limits as well.

They may also haveheavy-duty spam filtersthat block emails that may seem suspicious.

If they remain in that mode, your messages to that email address will bounce repeatedly.

Fortunately, you dont have to fold your arms and watch when this happens.

Here are four ways to resolve and possibly prevent bounced emails:

1.

Double/Check Email IDs

One of the most common reasons for email bounces is a misspelled or non-existent email ID.

Its good practice to double-check your recipients email ID before hitting send.

It also doesnt hurt to confirm that you have the right address from the owner when you receive it.

Update Information

Be in the habit of updating your contact information.

Reach out to your contacts regularly to ensure that the information you have with you is up-to-date.

This will reduce the number of email bounces you encounter.

Earlier, we mentioned that some emails fail to deliver because their sizes are incredibly large.

Gmail limits the size of your attachments to 25Mb, and other email providers have similar limits.

just familiarize yourself with the various rules that guide your email server.

Also, note that there are several methods available for you toemail large attachments seamlessly.

All email servers have spam filters that prevent their users from being bombarded with content that doesnt concern them.

you could use online resources such as tester.com and isnotspam.com to review your email for spam content.

you might handle the situation without causing too much anxiety with the fixes listed in this article.

There are also other things you’re free to do to track down emails.