Bounced Email

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What Does Bounced Email Mean?

A bounced email refers to any email message that is not delivered to the recipient and is returned or bounced back to the sender. It is an email message that fails to be received by recipient due to various reasons such as, typos, technical or security reasons. The original email message is returned as an attachment in a new email (bounced email) sent from the sender’s or recipients email server.

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Techopedia Explains Bounced Email

A bounced email is a delivery error message for an email that never reached the recipients inbox. Some of the most common reasons for bounced emails include:

  • Typo error: The sender enters the wrong email address for the recipient.

  • Technical Error: Email will be bounced back when the recipient’s inbox/mailbox is full or the size of the email message is greater than the recipients supported limit.

  • Security: The senders email or email domain is not in the preferred list and is, therefore, blocked and returned back by the receiver’s email or spam server.

Depending upon the reason behind the email bounce, the bounced email message varies. For example, when being bounced back due to the mailbox of the recipient being full, the bounced email message will mention it in the message body.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.