Bounce Management Explained

Bounce Management is a Salesforce feature that monitors whether emails sent from Salesforce are successfully delivered to recipients. When an email is sent to an invalid or unreachable email address, the email is returned to the sender — this is called a "bounce." Salesforce Bounce Management tracks these failed deliveries and displays a notification on the Contact or Lead record so users can correct the email address.
This article explains what Bounce Management is, how to enable it, and the difference between hard and soft bounces.

How to Enable Bounce Management

A system administrator enables Bounce Management from Setup:

1. Go to Setup and search for Deliverability.
2. Check the Activate bounce management checkbox.

Hard Bounce vs. Soft Bounce

Understanding the type of bounce helps diagnose whether an email address needs to be corrected.
Hard Bounce — A permanent delivery failure. This occurs when the recipient's email domain does not exist, the username is invalid, or the domain has no registered mail server. For example, a typo like "yaho.com" instead of "yahoo.com" causes a hard bounce. Hard bounces are permanently returned to the sender.
Soft Bounce — A temporary delivery failure. This occurs when the recipient's mail server is temporarily unavailable, offline for maintenance, or when the recipient's mailbox is full. Soft bounces may resolve on their own if the issue is temporary.
Note — Emails ending in ".invalid": Salesforce's mail server automatically discards all emails sent to addresses ending in ".invalid". While these emails may appear as "sent" in the Salesforce user interface (UI), they are never actually delivered. Addresses ending in ".invalid" are intended for testing purposes only.