Hard Bounces vs Soft: What Each One Costs You
Hard and soft bounces explained in plain English, and why your sender reputation pays for every one of them.
Tools
Preflight checks for your email campaign
Ten checks that decide whether your campaign delivers or fails before it's even sent — authentication, list hygiene, consent, content. Tick them off before every send; it takes minutes.
0 of 10 checks verified
Runs entirely in your browser — nothing is sent or stored, and your ticks vanish on refresh. A checklist reduces risk before you send; it can't guarantee placement, because nobody controls that.
Reading up on what you couldn't tick
Ten checks cover a lot of ground, and most people find one or two they can't tick confidently. Whatever yours turns out to be, there's a deeper write-up on it: the two-year-old addresses hurting your bounce rate are covered in dead addresses and list hygiene, the send-volume cliff is explained in the IP warm-up playbook, and what your DMARC reports are telling you starts with the DMARC report reading checklist.
Bounced mail and complaints are the two signals mailbox providers weigh heaviest, and both trace back to who is on your list — what each bounce type costs you breaks that down. Getting the SPF side right before a send starts with building the record one answer at a time. And if the box you couldn't tick was the DMARC reports one, DMarcus ticks it for free — Marcus reads every report and emails you the weekly verdict, no card needed.
The one box almost nobody checks
Check 3 asks whether your DMARC reports go somewhere you actually read. For most senders the answer is nowhere. Marcus analyses every one, every week, and emails you the verdict — free.
More tools
Free, browser-based, nothing to sign up for.
Email authentication checker
Check any domain's SPF, DKIM and DMARC — records shown, interpreted in plain English.
DMARC report viewer
Upload the aggregate report your inbox provider sends you — get plain English back on who's sending as you.
Deliverability ROI calculator
What is better email performance worth to you? Honest numbers out, every assumption shown.
Mautic vs ESP cost comparison
Managed Mautic against typical ESP pricing — find the subscriber count where the crossover happens.
SPF record generator
Build your SPF record sender by sender, with the ten-lookup budget visible as you go.
From the blog
View all posts »Straightforward guides and updates on authentication, deliverability and overall strategy.
The DMARC Report Reading Checklist: What to Look At First
Aggregate reports arrive as unreadable XML. This is a guide to parsing and understanding those files. The fields that matter and the ones to ignore, plus, what each finding means strategically.
IP Warm-Up: Start Sending Without Torching Your Reputation
New sending infrastructure has no reputation, which receiving servers treat with suspicion. This guide is the staged process for building reputation safely, and the mistakes that can burn it in week one.
Dead Addresses: Worse Than No List at All
Bigger list, more sends. That used to be the whole logic of email marketing. It no longer works like that. How to prune a list, when to do it, and why keeping dead addresses hurts you.