A soft bounce in Zoho Campaigns is a temporary delivery failure where the email address is valid but the email could not be delivered due to a transient issue, such as a full inbox, a temporarily unavailable mail server, or a message that is too large. Unlike hard bounces, soft bounces may resolve on retry.
Zoho Campaigns automatically retries soft-bounced emails. After a defined number of consecutive soft bounces (typically 4-5), the contact is reclassified as a hard bounce and excluded from future sends. This prevents wasting send quota and protecting sender reputation from repeated failures.
A sudden spike in soft bounces from contacts at the same domain may indicate the recipient’s mail server is down or temporarily blocking your IP. If this persists for multiple campaigns, investigate whether your sending IP or domain has been blocklisted by that domain’s mail provider.
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