Managing bounced leads and cleaning your lists

Draft — written from product facts + domain knowledge; UI labels to be verified before publishing.

A bounce is an email the receiving server rejected. Bounces are the fastest way to damage sender reputation: mailbox providers treat a sender who keeps hitting dead addresses as a spammer. Keep your campaign bounce rate under 3% (under 2% is the goal), and clean lists before and after every campaign. This article explains the two bounce types, how OutreachFox handles them, and a repeatable clean-up routine.

Hard vs soft bounces

Steps: clean a campaign after bounces

1. Open the campaign and click Contacts.
2. Set the Status filter to Bounced.
3. Tick select-all and choose Export to keep a suppression file.
4. With the same selection, choose Delete to remove them from the campaign (optional; bounced leads no longer receive emails either way).
5. Go to Contacts, open the source list, and remove the same addresses so they are not reused.
6. If the bounce rate is above 3%, pause the campaign and run the remaining Not contacted leads through email verification before resuming (see Email verification: how it works and what each status means).

Steps: prevent bounces before launch

1. Verify every new list before uploading, or use the lead database's verified emails.
2. Upload with Skip for duplicates so you never re-import an address that bounced earlier and was cleaned.
3. In campaign Settings → Show advanced configurations, set Pause campaign when bounce rate reaches to 3% (see Bounce protection). This is your safety net.
4. Send from mailboxes that have warmed up for at least 14 days; new mailboxes bounce more because receiving servers do not trust them yet.

Tips

• Catch-all domains are the main source of "verified" addresses that still bounce. Treat catch-all / accept-all results as risky and send them from a separate campaign with a lower daily limit.
• Role addresses (info@, sales@, support@) bounce and get reported as spam more often. Drop them.
• Old lists decay at roughly 2–3% per month as people change jobs. Re-verify anything older than 90 days.
• Watch the Bounce rate on the Mailbox → Warm up tab too; a single mailbox with a high bounce rate can be the cause rather than the list.

Troubleshooting

• Bounce rate suddenly spikes on a list that was fine: usually a mailbox problem (authentication broken, domain blacklisted), not the list. Check Domain and Mailbox health before blaming the data.
• Bounced leads still show in Contacts: expected. The campaign status is Bounced; the contact record is kept so you can suppress it. Delete from Contacts only if you want it gone entirely.
• Verified addresses still bounce: verification is a point-in-time check and cannot confirm catch-all domains. A 1–2% residual bounce rate on verified lists is normal.

Related articles

• Bounce protection: auto-pause a campaign at a bounce-rate threshold
• Email verification: how it works and what each status means
• Lead statuses explained
• Export leads to CSV
• Unlock verified emails and how credits are charged