Hard Bounce - Soft Bounce Dilemma

As a marketer, nothing gives me more pain than cleaning up my email lists. Deleting email addresses that has taken months togather after searching high and low. But clean we must inorder to be efficient and to save money.

Cleaning of email lists generally begins with the email bounces list provided by the emailing software. The bounce list as people aware of such technology will know, usually consists of 2 lists - a Hard Bounce List and a Soft Bounce List. Now herein lies the confusion. The definition of what constitutes a Hard bounce or soft bounce varies over various over Recepients and ISP.

Some email clients consider a Full Email Inbox has a Hard Bounce whereas some consider it a soft bounce and multiple attempts is made by the mailing software to ensure deliverability.So it is pretty difficult to clean lists based solely on Hard-Soft bounce reports as perfectly good email addresses might get deleted if only hard bounces are considered or bad email addresses might remain on the list if soft bounces are considered clean

This article by Derek Harding provides a decent overview on tackling the dilemma. Its worth a read if you are in the same spot as me. My two cents of advice on dealing with the issue:

1. Bounce is bounce so something must be amiss, so its better to take them all from the main mailing list inorder to ensure better efficiency
2. Bounce email Ids to be black listed or flagged seperately
3. Seperate mailing activity to be done only on the flagged email ids.
4. If email Ids consistently feature in the bounced list 3 consecutive times spread over a decent timeline like 3 months then it is wise to delete the email Id completely

what say?