---
title: "What Is an Email Bounce? Hard vs Soft Bounces | ONEGTMLAB"
description: "An email bounce is a message that could not be delivered and was returned. Learn the difference between hard and soft bounces and why bounce rate matters."
canonical: https://www.onegtmlab.dev/glossary/email-bounce
---

# What Is an Email Bounce? Hard vs Soft Bounces | ONEGTMLAB

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GTM Glossary

# Email Bounce

An email bounce is a message that could not be delivered and was returned to the sender by the receiving mail server, usually with a code explaining why.

Also called: email bounce rate, hard bounce, soft bounce

## Why it matters

Bounces affect more than the one message. For cold outreach, keeping bounces low is one of the basic conditions of good deliverability.

A hard bounce is a permanent failure, such as an address or domain that does not exist; the address should be removed. A soft bounce is temporary, such as a full mailbox or a server that is briefly unavailable, and the message may succeed later. Teams reduce bounces by verifying addresses before sending and removing hard bounces at once.

## Example

An SDR team sends 500 emails from an unverified list and 40 come back as hard bounces because the addresses no longer exist. Before the next campaign, the team runs the list through an email verification tool, removes invalid and risky addresses, and the next send produces only a handful of bounces.

## Related terms

-   [Email Verification](/glossary/email-verification)
-   [Email Deliverability](/glossary/email-deliverability)
-   [Cold Email](/glossary/cold-email)
-   [MX Record](/glossary/mx-record)

## Related service

[GTM Engineering Signal-led outbound systems that enrich, score, sequence and sync to your CRM.](/ai-gtm-engineering)

## Related playbook

-   [Cold Email Playbook Domains, a verified list, a mail gateway gate, final-text copy and launch checks, in that order.](/growth-playbooks/cold-email)

[← All GTM terms, A to Z](/glossary)

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