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Enable Email Bounce Handling
With bounce handling, reps know when an email doesn’t get delivered to recipients. And they also know which lead, contact, or person account has a bad email address when there’s a permanent delivery failure. Review the considerations for the behavior resulting from a soft bounce (a temporary delivery failure), or from a hard bounce (a permanent delivery failure).
Required Editions
| Available in Lightning Experience and all Salesforce apps in: Essentials, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions |
| User Permissions Needed | |
|---|---|
| To enable email tracking: | Customize Application AND Modify All Data |
See Also
Learn About Email Bounce Types and Delivery Failures
Emails sent from Salesforce first go to Mail Transfer Agents (MTAs), which then pass the email on to the recipient’s email address. An email can fail for several reasons, resulting in either a soft or hard bounce.
- Soft bounces indicate temporary delivery failures, such as a full mailbox or a temporarily unavailable mail server. These failures are retryable and aren’t caused by issues with the email address.
- Hard bounces indicate permanent delivery failures, such as an invalid or non-existent recipient address.
If delivery fails, the recipient’s system returns a Delivery Status Notification (DSN) that explains the failure. 4xx DSN codes indicate soft bounces, while 5xx DSN codes indicate hard bounces. Salesforce parses and processes this information to show bounce warnings and to flag records with invalid email addresses. There are two types of delivery failures.
- In-band or synchronous bounces: When providers, such as Gmail, send a DSN immediately without accepting the email.
- Out-of-band or asynchronous bounces: When providers, such as Microsoft, first accept an email and later send a DSN.
Manage Bounced Emails
Enable bounce management to show email bounce information in the activity timeline for all emails except list emails and emails sent from cases.
- From Setup, click Email, then click Deliverability.
- Select Activate bounce management.
- Optionally, select Return bounced emails to sender. Bounced emails are returned as attachments to the sender.
When bounce management is on, Salesforce automatically uses the return address
path ending with .bnc.salesforce.com to receive and process delivery
failure notifications.
If an email results in a soft or hard bounce, the email record’s IsBounced field is set to True, and a bounce icon is shown on the activity timeline.
Salesforce marks a contact, lead, or person account as bounced only for a hard bounce, indicating that the email address is invalid. In such cases, the EmailBouncedDate and EmailBouncedReason fields are populated, and a bounce icon is shown on those record detail pages.
Use the EmailBouncedReason field in list views to find contacts, leads, and person accounts with email addresses that generated hard bounces. You can use the field in a similar way in reports and workflows to create workflow rules based on the hard bounce status. EmailBouncedReason is a text field and contains whatever description was provided in the email bounce reply.
In the highlights panel at the top of the contact, lead, or person account detail pages, an alert icon appears next to the email address. The icon indicates that the email address generated a hard bounce. Ensure that the email address field is in the highlights panel of the detail record page so that users can see the alert.
Email providers don’t follow a single standard and Salesforce continuously interprets all possible DSN messages to determine whether an email address is invalid. Not all unreachable or non-existent domains are hard bounces, as these issues may result from temporary DNS or network problems.
Identify and Clear Bounce Alerts
Edit the contact, lead, or person account record to confirm or update the email address and clear the bounce alert.
Limitations for Email Bounce Handling
- Bounce handling doesn’t support encrypted email addresses. If you need bounce handling, don’t encrypt the standard email field.
- Emails sent through Einstein Activity Capture don’t update the IsBounced field.
- When an enterprise application platform (EAP) is enabled, email bounces are handled by Sales Engagement and the reason is set to “Details unavailable”. We're unable to specify if the email wasn’t delivered due to a soft or hard bounce.
