We keep receiving questions about bounces in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, specifically what is the “false bounce” and how to deal with it. The below article explains what soft bounce is, what impact false bounces can have, and how to deal with them.
As you know an email bounce is a message that can’t be delivered to its recipient. The two most common reasons for it are, when your users type in the wrong email address (or the email address is invalid, or does not exist) or when the mailbox of a contact is down.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud assigns the invalid email addresses with a status HELD,
Held subscribers no longer receive any commercial emails from SFMC. Bounces can affect deliverability, so to protect your sender IP and sending domain, SFMC will prevent future sends to these email addresses. But there is an opposite side of the bounce management in SFMC, so-called False Bounces.
A false bounce is normally recorded when the recipient’s email server sends a bounce response but then sends a delivery response for the email.
This can happen when an email shows a bounced response but then there is an open or click recorded for that email. This could be from a CC or BCC recipient opening the email or clicking links.
Once a Bounce Response is resolved and the email is delivered it is removed from Tracking Tab in Email Studio but will remain in the Data View: Bounce
Many SFMC users rely on the Bounce data view. They do not realize that the Data View result contains more records than the number of records in the exported file from My Tracking.
According to some customers’ reports, the Data View result can contain about 60 more records than the exported file from My Tracking.
So basically tens of subscribers can obtain a status HELD by mistake and be excluded from further communications in SFMC.
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