Bounces
Permanent delivery failures mark the lead Bounced, stop them everywhere and count against the campaign — temporary hiccups don't.
Where: Replies → Bounced folder; lead status Bounced in Leads and under a campaign's Leads tab → Bounced filter; the email itself under the campaign's Emails tab → Bounced
How to do it
- Open Replies and click the Bounced folder.
- Each entry is from "Mail delivery — bounced" with the original delivery-failure subject (or "Delivery failed") and the failure text, so you can see why an address failed.
- Check the person in Leads: their status is Bounced and their activity line says "Bounced". In a campaign, filter its Leads tab by Bounced to see them all.
Good to know
- Bounce reports are recognised by their sender (mailer-daemon, postmaster) or subject ("Undeliverable", "Delivery Status Notification", "Mail delivery failed", "Address not found" and similar) and are read from both the inbox and the Spam/Junk folder of the receiving mailbox.
- Only a permanent (hard) failure counts as a bounce: no such user, address not found, mailbox unavailable or disabled, domain does not exist. Delay and temporary notices ("will be retried", greylisting, deferred), a full mailbox or over-quota message, and rate-limit or throttling notices are ignored — the address is fine and the lead keeps their place in the sequence.
- A bounce is only attributed when it is certain: either the report references the exact email MailFleet sent, or it comes from a genuine mail-delivery daemon in the inbox and names the failed address. Subject-only lookalikes and reports found in Spam without a reference are treated as junk (backscatter) and never mark a lead.
- Effect: the lead's status is Bounced, every enrolment in every campaign is set to Bounced (no more sends from anywhere), the email that bounced is marked Bounced on the campaign's Emails tab and counts in the campaign's Bounced, and an Email bounced webhook fires. A lead who is already Bounced is never counted twice.
- Bounced leads are suppressed: they are held out of every list and appear under Suppressed on the Leads page; they cannot be pushed into a subsequence or enrolled again.
- Bounce entries arrive already marked read, so they never inflate the unread badge, and they only appear in the Bounced folder — never in the Inbox, Archived or any view.
- The Bounced folder shows your total number of bounces even though the queue lists only the latest 150.
Questions people ask
Why is my bounce rate lower than what my inbox shows?
MailFleet only counts permanent failures of the address. Delay notices, full mailboxes and throttling messages are not bounces — those emails usually deliver — and emails refused as spam or on policy are counted as Blocked, shown beside Bounced (see Blocked vs Bounced deliveries).
Can I un-bounce a lead?
Not from Replies. Bounced is a suppression status; a corrected address needs to be imported as a new lead.