When an e-mail bounces, this means it was not delivered for one reason or another. There are different kinds of bounces for different situations. A hard bounce means the e-mail address flat out doesn’t exist. Think of it like a Return to Sender when trying to send something in the post to an address that doesn’t exist.
There are many reasons why a once-valid e-mail address stops working. However, just because an e-mail stops working doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try and continue a relationship with the person.
Unfortunately, most businesses don’t place a high priority on contacting and recovering a working e-mail address. This can result in false list statistics. For example, if we have 100 people but 15 are hard bounced, we really only have 85 people who can be reached via e-mail. Not only does this bad data throw off reporting, it can also lead to a bloated and, effectively, useless database.
The good news is that with Infusionsoft, we can automatically catch e-mails when they hard bounce and assign a task to someone to contact the person to collect a working e-mail.
Infusionsoft Cookbook – Chapter 8.1 – Reconciling Hard Bounced E-mail Addresses
