Glossary

Bounce rate

The share of sent emails rejected by the receiving server, the headline measure of email list hygiene.

Hard bounces mean the mailbox does not exist. Above roughly three percent, mailbox providers start treating the sender as careless and inbox placement drops for everything else you send.

Catch-all domains accept everything, so they neither bounce nor confirm. They should be marked as unverifiable rather than counted as valid.

Bounce rate is a lagging measure of a sourcing problem. Fixing it means verifying before sending, not cleaning after.

How we handle it

Work emails are checked for syntax, disposable domains, domain records and employer-domain match before a contact is released.

Related terms

Keep reading