Calculate your email bounce rate to monitor deliverability health and maintain sender reputation.
Important: Bounce rates above 5% indicate list quality issues. Rates above 10% can severely damage your sender reputation and lead to blacklisting.
Email bounce rate is the percentage of email messages that are returned to the sender because they could not be delivered to the recipient's inbox. This metric is crucial for understanding the health of your email list and the effectiveness of your email deliverability practices.
Bounces are categorized into two types: hard bounces and soft bounces. Hard bounces occur when an email is permanently rejected due to invalid email addresses, non-existent domains, or blocked recipients. Soft bounces are temporary delivery failures caused by full mailboxes, server issues, or messages that are too large. A high bounce rate signals poor list quality and can severely damage your sender reputation with email service providers.
Permanent delivery failures that occur when an email cannot be delivered.
Action: Remove immediately from your list
Temporary delivery issues that may resolve on their own.
Action: Retry, but remove after multiple failures
Excellent - healthy list with high-quality addresses.
Good - acceptable range, but monitor for increases.
Warning - investigate and clean your list immediately.
Critical - serious deliverability and reputation damage.
Use email verification services to validate addresses before adding them to your list. This prevents invalid addresses from entering your database in the first place.
Require subscribers to confirm their email address through a verification email. This ensures addresses are valid and actively monitored by the recipient.
Automatically remove hard bounces from your list after the first occurrence. Continuing to send to these addresses damages your sender reputation.
Track soft bounces and remove addresses that consistently bounce. If an address soft bounces 3-5 times, treat it as a hard bounce and remove it.
Perform regular list hygiene by removing inactive subscribers and re-validating addresses. Clean lists quarterly or whenever bounce rates start to increase.
Never buy email lists. These lists typically have high bounce rates, spam traps, and invalid addresses that will damage your sender reputation.
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