Share your average bounce rates

The question came up on slack this morning about bounce rate benchmarks. What are the normal / average bounces that different ESPs see? Does region matter? What’s acceptable for bounce rates?

Bounce rate is an overall measure of address quality

Here’s your the chance for ESPs share the data from your customers. We’re interested in anything you care to share. But more detail is always helpful. Some suggestions:

  • Overall bounce rate for 2018.
  • Bounce rate for 2018 compared to 2017.
  • Rate by month.
  • Rate by region (US, EMEA, AsiaPac, etc).
  • Rate by industry.
  • Bounce rates that make you sit up and take notice.

Feel free to add any other numbers. This is just an informal poll of readers.

Anonymization / Privacy note for this post: Generally I don’t approve comments from clearly forged or fake email addresses. If you want your comment to stay anonymous, use an address that’s not been previously approved and it will go into moderation. Please let me know who you are in the text and I will edit before approving the post.

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What’s a bounce?

Bounces and bounce handling is one of those topics I’ve avoided writing about for a long time. Part of my avoidance is because there are decades of confusing terminology that hasn’t ever been really defined. Untangling that terminology is the first step to being able to talk sensibly about what to do. Instead of writing a giant long post, I can break it into smaller, more focused posts.

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Relaying Denied

I’ve got multiple clients right now looking for insights about bounce handling. This means I’m doing a lot of thought work about bounces and what they mean and how they match up and how different ISPs manage delivery and how different ESPs manage delivery and how it all fits together. One thing I’ve been trying to do is contextualize bounces based on what the reason is.
Despite what people may thing, spam filtering isn’t the only reason an email fails to deliver. There are lots of other reasons, too. There is a whole category of network problems like routing issues, TCP failures, DNS failures and such. There are address issues where a recipient simply doesn’t exist, or is blocking a particular sender. There are spam and authentication issues. The discussion of all these issues is way longer than a blog post, and I’m working on that.
One of the interesting bounces that is so rare most people, including me, never talk about is “Relaying Denied.” This is, however, one of the easier bounces to explain.
Relaying Denied means the mail server you’re talking to does not handle mail for the domain you’re sending to. 
Well, OK, but how does that happen?
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DNS records are incorrect. These can be due to a number of things

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