Soft vs hard bounces

A hard bounce means the receiving server rejected the message for good: the address doesn’t exist, the domain is invalid, or similar. A soft bounce means it was rejected for a temporary reason, like a full mailbox or a server that’s briefly unreachable. EmailFig treats the two very differently.

Hard bounces: straight away, and across all of EmailFig

A single hard bounce marks the contact cleaned at once and suppresses that address across all of EmailFig, not just your account. Once an address is confirmed undeliverable, no account can send to it again.

That’s why you can’t re-import a hard-bounced address to try again. See Suppressions: why an address can’t be re-added.

Soft bounces: temporary, and only counted over time

A single soft bounce doesn’t suppress anything. EmailFig only acts once soft bounces for the same contact repeat across several separate campaigns within a 30-day window. At that point the contact gets marked cleaned and suppressed, this time only within your account.

Why this matters for your list

Hard-bounce rate is one of the two figures your deliverability health badge watches. A high one usually means the addresses weren’t collected recently, or weren’t collected through genuine opt-in. See Why you shouldn’t send to purchased lists.

Both hard-bounced and repeatedly soft-bounced contacts end up cleaned, a status separate from unsubscribed. See Contact statuses explained.