Bounce & Failure Intelligence

Understand why emails fail

A bounce isn't just a bounce. Is it a dead mailbox or a spam block? A DNS issue or rate limiting? Engagor classifies every failure by category, SMTP response pattern, ISP, and sender identity — so you know exactly what went wrong and what to do about it.

Deep failure diagnostics. Actionable root cause analysis.

ALL FAILURES 2.3% HARD BOUNCE 0.8% SOFT BOUNCE 1.2% DEFERRED 0.3% Invalid Recipient 0.6% Spam Block 0.2% Policy Reject 0.5% DNS Error 0.7% Rate Limit 0.3% List clean Content Auth Infra Throttle Hard Soft Deferred
SMTP Pattern Intelligence

Beyond bounce categories

Categories tell you what happened. SMTP patterns tell you why. Engagor analyzes raw SMTP response text to identify specific failure patterns and their root causes.

550 5.1.1 Invalid Recipient

"550 5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist"

ISP: Gmail Action: Remove from list Hard bounce
421 4.7.0 Rate Limit

"421 4.7.0 Try again later, closing connection"

ISP: Microsoft Action: Reduce velocity Soft bounce
550 5.7.1 Spam Block

"550 5.7.1 Message rejected due to content"

ISP: Yahoo Action: Review content Hard bounce
550 5.7.26 Policy

"550 5.7.26 This message does not pass authentication checks (SPF/DKIM)"

ISP: Gmail Action: Fix authentication Hard bounce
ISP Failure Profiles

Provider-specific failure patterns

Different ISPs fail differently. Gmail is strict on authentication. Microsoft throttles aggressively. Yahoo watches content closely. See failure patterns per provider.

Gmail

45% of volume
Healthy
Failure Rate 1.2%
Hard Bounce 0.4%
Soft Bounce 0.6%
Top Category Invalid Recipient
vs last week: ↓ 0.2%

Microsoft

32% of volume
Watch
Failure Rate 2.8%
Hard Bounce 0.9%
Soft Bounce 1.4%
Top Category Rate Limit
vs last week: ↑ 0.5%

Yahoo

15% of volume
Healthy
Failure Rate 1.8%
Hard Bounce 0.7%
Soft Bounce 0.9%
Top Category Spam Block
vs last week: — 0.0%
Identity-Level Analysis

Which streams are failing?

Not all sender identities fail equally. Your transactional stream might be pristine while promotional has issues. See failure rates per identity to isolate problems.

Filter failures by identity to understand which sending streams need attention. Compare identities to spot patterns — maybe all B2C streams have higher bounce rates than B2B.

Identity Failures Rate Top ISP Risk
promo-eu 1,247 2.4% Microsoft Watch
transactional 89 0.3% Gmail Low
newsletter-fr 456 1.8% Orange Low
marketing-de 892 3.1% Microsoft High
Get Started

Ready to understand your failures?

See how deep failure diagnostics can turn bounces into actionable insights.