Bounce Types Explained: Hard vs Soft, and What They Actually Cost You
A bounced email looks like one lost send. It isn't. Hard vs soft bounces explained in plain English — and why your sender reputation pays for every one of them.
Tools
What is better email performance worth to you?
Enter your numbers and see what your email programme earns today — then test what improving each rate would be worth. Your numbers in, honest maths out.
Platform-reported open rates are inflated by Apple Mail Privacy Protection — use your reported figure and treat it as approximate.
Bounced mail never arrives. This is kept to a minimum with good list hygiene — and a sustained high bounce rate drags sender reputation, and everything above it, down with it.
Runs entirely in your browser — nothing is sent or stored. Default figures are generic starting points, not benchmarks: replace them with your own numbers from your email platform's dashboard.
Seeing a number you don't like?
The problems that cost you money are often the ones your dashboard doesn't show you.
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.
Preflight checklist
Ten checks to run before every campaign send — verified in minutes, before your sender reputation pays.
SPF record generator
Build your SPF record sender by sender, watching the lookup budget 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 the reading order — which fields matter, which to ignore, and what each finding means for your next move.
The IP Warm-Up Playbook: How to Start Sending Without Burning Your Sender Reputation
New sending infrastructure has no reputation — which receivers treat as suspicious. This is the staged process for building reputation deliberately, and the mistakes that burn it in week one.
List Hygiene for Small Businesses: Why Dead Addresses Are 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.