Handling a bounce, end to end

The flow, stage by stage#

1. Trigger — a message that was accepted for delivery is returned or reported as undeliverable.
2. External event — the receiving side tells the sending side, either in a returned message or in a provider notification.
3. Authentication and workspace resolution — the report is matched to the mailbox that sent the original, and the mailbox names the workspace.
4. Ingest — the report is normalised to two facts: which address failed, and whether the failure is permanent.
5. Canonical record — the outcome is written against the message that was sent, so the thread shows what happened rather than showing a message that appears delivered.
6. Classification and reasoning — permanent or temporary. Everything downstream depends on this one decision, so it is made from what the report says rather than from a guess.
7. Knowledge, memory and rules — the person's record is updated where the failure is permanent, because contactability is a fact about the relationship.
8. Autonomy and approval — unaffected. A bounce is an outcome, not a permission question.
9. Action through a provider — none. Nothing is sent in response to a bounce, and no address is probed to find a working one.
10. Result — for a permanent failure, a suppression carrying bounce as its origin; for a temporary one, a failed message with its reason and nothing else.
11. Relationship, timeline and memory — the failure is visible on the person, so the next person to open the record knows the address does not work.
12. Audit, usage and Needs You — the outcome is recorded, and repeated failures against one mailbox surface as an operational problem rather than as a run of unlucky messages.

Permanent and temporary#

Suppressing on a temporary failure would delete a real relationship because somebody's inbox was full on a Tuesday. Not suppressing on a permanent one leaves a workspace sending into an address that has not existed for a year, collecting failures that make its other mail less likely to arrive. The classification is therefore the whole of the work.

What a bounce is not permission to do#

• Not permission to guess another one. A bounced address is evidence that it is wrong, not a hint about what the right one is. Connect does not construct an address from a name and a domain, and a bounce does not change that.
• Not permission to re-send the same message harder. A clean failure can be sent again once its cause is fixed; a repeated attempt against a permanent failure is a message to nobody and a mark against the mailbox.
• Not a reply to write. Nothing outbound is generated by a bounce, and there is nobody at the failing address to receive it.
• Not a reason to delete the person. The relationship, the history and the company link survive; what changes is that one address does not work.

What you see, and what to do#

1. Open the thread. A bounced message shows its outcome rather than reading as delivered.

   Result You are not left comparing your sent folder against a silence to work out what happened.

2. Read the classification before acting.

   Result Permanent and temporary need opposite responses, and acting on the wrong one is how a good address gets suppressed or a dead one gets hammered.

3. For a permanent bounce, look for another route to the person on their record.

   Result A person can hold identities on more than one channel, and the timeline shows which of them has actually worked.

4. For repeated temporary failures across many recipients, treat it as a mailbox health question.

   Result A pattern spread across recipients is about the sender or its provider, not about the people being written to.

Failure modes#

The bounce cannot be matched to a message

The address is still recorded as having failed. Matching to the original is a convenience; the failure is the fact.

A bounce arrives long after the send

It is recorded when it arrives. Nothing already delivered elsewhere is affected, and nothing is re-sent to compensate.

An address bounces and later works

Clearing the suppression is a deliberate act with a visible origin, the same as clearing any other.

A sequence continues after a bounce

Check whether the failure was classified as temporary. A permanent one stops the sequence through the suppression rather than through the sequence's own logic.

Questions#

Related#

• Bounces
• Applying a suppression, end to end
• Deliverability
• Contactability
• Evidence-first prospecting without guessed emails