020.007

Bounce & Error Handling Standards

The "professional" way to handle failure. This section covers the best practice for bounce handling: suppress 1 hard bounce immediately, and suppress a soft bounce after 3-5 consecutive failures. This proves you are an 'aware' captain who doesn't crash into a closed port.

9 questions in this topic

What are the recommended bounce classification codes (per RFC 3463)? What does “enhanced status code” mean? How many retries are acceptable for transient bounces? What is standard retry timing (RFC 5321)? When should soft bounces be converted to hard bounces? How should senders manage unknown or ambiguous bounces? What’s the industry practice for bounce list retention? What is the M3AAWG recommendation for bounce reporting? How to ensure accurate bounce tracking across ESPs?