What does it mean for an email to bounce?
When an email bounces it means that Infosec IQ attempted to send an email to a user, and the recipient mail server replied with a failure response. When a bounce occurs, the learner will get marked as bounced in the IQ platform, and IQ won’t send more emails to that learner until the bounce status is cleared. In some cases delivery may be retried several times before the permanent failure occurs.
Why do emails bounce?
There are two types of bounces that typically occur:
- Soft Bounce: occurs when email delivery was attempted, but failed for a temporary reason. For example a soft bounce can occur due to conditions like a user’s mailbox is full, the message is too large, or if the recipient mail server just doesn’t respond.
- Hard Bounce: occurs when an email will never be delivered, for example if the recipient mailbox doesn’t exist.
Under normal sending circumstances these conditions are pretty straightforward, but when using Infosec IQ to send a large number of emails this is more complicated. For example many mail filters and security appliances can reply with bounce responses to deter spammers. If this happens, learners can still get marked as bounced in IQ.
If you are seeing a large number of bounced learners, or learners getting marked as bounced repeatedly, then you may need to review your allowlisting and email policies. We have many of the common configurations documented in our Sending Configurations category.
How to check if emails are bouncing
Campaign Run Details
Go to a PhishSim Campaign and click the “i” icon to view the details for the campaign and then click the bar chart icon to view information about each sent email. The Status field will show if the email bounced.
Note: If you are attempting to send an email to a previously bounced learner they will not appear in the list of scheduled emails from the campaign run details page.
View a bounced learner report
To view a list of bounced learners, browse to Reports > My Dashboards, and navigate to the dashboard called Your Learner Reports. There are widgets in this dashboard which will provide details about bounced learners.
Clear the bounce status
If a learner gets marked as bounced the status can be cleared from the learner’s profile in the IQ admin portal. From the learner list, or in an individual learner’s profile, click Edit, then check the box acknowledging the email is valid.
If you have a large number of bounced learners, please contact Infosec Customer Experience for assistance. We can help by clearing bounced statuses, and we may also able to provide the reason that the bounce occurred. In some cases we may set you up with an appointment to review your mail settings with a member of our Tier 2 Support team. You can open a support case inside the Infosec IQ admin portal by clicking the ? on the lower-right of any page.