What is a bounced email? And what’s the difference between a hard and a soft bounce?

A bounced email is an email that cannot be delivered to the recipient. The difference between a soft and a hard bounce can be defined by the permanency in the failure to deliver an email. Soft bounces are caused by temporary failures, such as a server being down, a recipient is out of office, or a mailbox is full. A Hard bounce is a more permanent failure to deliver. Examples of common hard bounces are “user unknown”- the email address does not exist, and “host unknown”- the domain does not exist.  

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