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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Customer experience | Sales, Customer Insights,... / How are soft bounces m...
Customer experience | Sales, Customer Insights,...
Suggested answer

How are soft bounces managed in Dynamics?

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Posted on by Eddie Telfast 176

Hi guys

I'm wondering how  Dynamics marketing treats bounces. It appears hard bounces are put on a suppression list for 6 months which is fine but i can't find ANY information on how Dynamics marketing treats soft bounces.

As soft bounces are due to temporary issues, previous email marketing systems i've used attempt delivery multiple times of a period of a few days. You can often specify the times taken between sends. Does Dynamics do this? If so how many attempts does it make, and over what period of time? Is this customizable?

Or is this expected to be a manual process that the sender has to re-send their message to a segment created by the soft bounces from the relevant customer journey? I would find it extremely hard to believe that such a process isn't automated, yet as i can find zero documentation on how they are handled how are we supposed to know?

Thanks in advance for your support!

  • Monique van Delft Profile Picture
    Monique van Delft 21 on at
    RE: How are soft bounces managed in Dynamics?

    Dear Ivan, Dan,

    I was searching for the same answers concerning soft bouncers. In what time period does Dynamics try to sent it  again later? And what does this mean for the end date of my marketing automaion flow? Does a hard bouncer effect the setting of communication preference bulk email? Could you please sent me more information if you found out more via email?

  • Eddie Telfast Profile Picture
    Eddie Telfast 176 on at
    RE: How are soft bounces managed in Dynamics?

    Hi Ivan,

    This information is still generic and does not help in this situation. There are no error codes in the insights tab. I'll follow up via email.

  • Suggested answer
    Ivan Maltsev Profile Picture
    Ivan Maltsev on at
    RE: How are soft bounces managed in Dynamics?

    Hello, Dan

    I think I can answer your question regarding Soft Bounces.

    There are multiple types of bounces - transient errors and permanent errors. They are identifiably by a bounce code and sometimes by the error message if the bounce code does not describe the issue properly.

    transient errors are bounces starting with code 4xx (for example 421 Try again later  or 451 User over quota). Email addresses bounced with such errors are being moved to delayed queue on the sending server, and will be retried later based on recipient domain settings until it gets delivered or until message expiration time passes by.

    permanent errors are bounces that are not being resent automatically. Such errors usually starting with error code 5xx (for example 550 5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist or 554 5.4.14 Hop count exceeded - possible mail loop). More information about these errors you can read in our documentation that describes our bounce  categories feature. 

    Hope you find this information helpful.

  • cloflyMao Profile Picture
    cloflyMao 25,202 on at
    RE: How are soft bounces managed in Dynamics?

    Hi Dan,

    Some community member also asked similar question about email administration which is not detailed in Doc.

    For in-depth details concerning the deliverability, you could contact to Ivan Maltsev. (Deliverability Expert at Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing.)

    I found an article from him, but it only mentioned that resending a soft-bounced email to the recipient is usually enough to get it delivered. 

    https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/dynamics365/it/2020/10/08/keep-an-eye-on-your-email-bounce-rates-in-dynamics-365-marketing/

    Regards,

    Clofly

  • Eddie Telfast Profile Picture
    Eddie Telfast 176 on at
    RE: How are soft bounces managed in Dynamics?

    Hi Clofly,

    Thanks for your response but this doesn't answer any of my questions.

    From how I read the glossary, if 5 consecutive messages are sent to the email address and all soft bounce it will become a hard bounce, but it doesn't explain whether the system attempts to re-send the same message after the initial attempt. This is the basic feature every system i've used has had.

    eg I send an email and recipient X gets a soft bounce, they system will automatically try to re-send the same email to that same email address a few hours later, and again the next day. For a period of say 48 hours after the original send. Maybe the recipient's server was down but it is now online again, or the inbox was full and then cleared extra room, so the subsequent automated attempt would be successful where the original attempt was a soft bounce. 

    I understand i can create a segment to taregt these bounces manually but this is a very labour intensive and outdated way to deal with this issue. Surely Dynamics 365 has an automated process that handles this for the user?

  • Suggested answer
    cloflyMao Profile Picture
    cloflyMao 25,202 on at
    RE: How are soft bounces managed in Dynamics?

    Hi Dan,

    1. Please check whether the following information would be what you want to know:

    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/marketing/insights-glossary

    Email soft bounced

    A soft bounce occurs when an email is sent to a valid server, which recognizes the user, but which still rejects the message for some reason. A soft bounce may occur because the recipient's mailbox is full, the mail server is temporarily unavailable, or the email account has been closed. If five messages in a row sent to a given address result in a soft bounce, then Marketing will treat that address as a hard-bouncing address and stop trying to send to it.

    (In other word, Dynamics 365 Marketing will try to resend the email five times, and if it fails to deliver the email, D365M will then define the email as a Hard Bounce.)

    In addition, Dynamics 365 Marketing includes a bounce categorization feature to identify the cause of bounced campaign emails:

    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/marketing/email-bounce-categories

    2. As same as hard bounce, the process is not customizable.

    3. We can build a segment to find contacts whose emails have soft bounced.

    pastedimage1604903644102v2.png

    Regards,

    Clofly

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